Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face.  It cannot be concealed.  People talk sometimes of secret vices.  There are no such things.  If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.  Somebody—­I won’t mention his name, but you know him—­came to me last year to have his portrait done.  I had never seen him before, and had never heard anything about him at the time, though I have heard a good deal since.  He offered an extravagant price.  I refused him.  There was something in the shape of his fingers that I hated.  I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied about him.  His life is dreadful.  But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth—­ I can’t believe anything against you.  And yet I see you very seldom, and you never come down to the studio now, and when I am away from you, and I hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I don’t know what to say.  Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it?  Why is it that so many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house or invite you to theirs?  You used to be a friend of Lord Staveley.  I met him at dinner last week.  Your name happened to come up in conversation, in connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the Dudley.  Staveley curled his lip and said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with.  I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked him what he meant.  He told me.  He told me right out before everybody.  It was horrible!  Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?  There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide.  You were his great friend.  There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name.  You and he were inseparable.  What about Adrian Singleton and his dreadful end?  What about Lord Kent’s only son and his career?  I met his father yesterday in St. James’s Street.  He seemed broken with shame and sorrow.  What about the young Duke of Perth?  What sort of life has he got now?  What gentleman would associate with him?”

“Stop, Basil.  You are talking about things of which you know nothing,” said Dorian Gray, biting his lip, and with a note of infinite contempt in his voice.  “You ask me why Berwick leaves a room when I enter it.  It is because I know everything about his life, not because he knows anything about mine.  With such blood as he has in his veins, how could his record be clean?  You ask me about Henry Ashton and young Perth.  Did I teach the one his vices, and the other his debauchery?  If Kent’s silly son takes his wife from the streets, what is that to me?  If Adrian Singleton writes his friend’s name across a bill, am I his keeper?