their conjugal felicity in one’s face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.  Religion consoles some.  Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me, and I can quite understand it.  Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.  Conscience makes egotists of us all.  Yes; there is really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life.  Indeed, I have not mentioned the most important one.”

“What is that, Harry?” said the lad listlessly.

“Oh, the obvious consolation.  Taking some one else’s admirer when one loses one’s own.  In good society that always whitewashes a woman.  But really, Dorian, how different Sibyl Vane must have been from all the women one meets!  There is something to me quite beautiful about her death.  I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen.  They make one believe in the reality of the things we all play with, such as romance, passion, and love.”

“I was terribly cruel to her.  You forget that.”

“I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else.  They have wonderfully primitive instincts.  We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same.  They love being dominated.  I am sure you were splendid.  I have never seen you really and absolutely angry, but I can fancy how delightful you looked.  And, after all, you said something to me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely fanciful, but that I see now was absolutely true, and it holds the key to everything.”

“What was that, Harry?”

“You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines of romance—­that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen.”

“She will never come to life again now,” muttered the lad, burying his face in his hands.

“No, she will never come to life.  She has played her last part.  But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur.  The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.  To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare’s plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare’s music sounded richer and more full of joy.  The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away.  Mourn for Ophelia, if you like.  Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled.  Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died.  But don’t waste your tears over Sibyl Vane.  She was less real than they are.”

There was a silence.  The evening darkened in the room.  Noiselessly, and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden.  The colours faded wearily out of things.