“You are mad, Dorian.”

“Ah!  I was waiting for you to call me Dorian.”

“You are mad, I tell you—­mad to imagine that I would raise a finger to help you, mad to make this monstrous confession.  I will have nothing to do with this matter, whatever it is.  Do you think I am going to peril my reputation for you?  What is it to me what devil’s work you are up to?”

“It was suicide, Alan.”

“I am glad of that.  But who drove him to it?  You, I should fancy.”

“Do you still refuse to do this for me?”

“Of course I refuse.  I will have absolutely nothing to do with it.  I don’t care what shame comes on you.  You deserve it all.  I should not be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced.  How dare you ask me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror?  I should have thought you knew more about people’s characters.  Your friend Lord Henry Wotton can’t have taught you much about psychology, whatever else he has taught you.  Nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you.  You have come to the wrong man.  Go to some of your friends.  Don’t come to me.”

“Alan, it was murder.  I killed him.  You don’t know what he had made me suffer.  Whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or the marring of it than poor Harry has had.  He may not have intended it, the result was the same.”

“Murder!  Good God, Dorian, is that what you have come to? 
I shall not inform upon you.  It is not my business.  Besides, without
my stirring in the matter, you are certain to be arrested. 
Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid. 
But I will have nothing to do with it.”

“You must have something to do with it.  Wait, wait a moment; listen to me.  Only listen, Alan.  All I ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment.  You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there don’t affect you.  If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject.  You would not turn a hair.  You would not believe that you were doing anything wrong.  On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind.  What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.  Indeed, to destroy a body must be far less horrible than what you are accustomed to work at.  And, remember, it is the only piece of evidence against me.  If it is discovered, I am lost; and it is sure to be discovered unless you help me.”

“I have no desire to help you.  You forget that.  I am simply indifferent to the whole thing.  It has nothing to do with me.”