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 * CHAPTER ONE
   
   June 21st, 2023
   
   The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer
   wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door
   the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the
   pink-flowering thorn.
   
   From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying,
   smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could
   just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a
   laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a
   beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of
   birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were
   stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese
   effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo
   who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to
   convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees
   shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with
   monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine,
   seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like
   the bourdon note of a distant organ.
   
   In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length
   portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it,
   some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward,
   whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public
   excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.
   
   As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully
   mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed
   about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes,
   placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his
   brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.
   
   “It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,” said Lord
   Henry languidly. “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The
   Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have
   been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures,
   which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the
   people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.”
   
   “I don’t think I shall send it anywhere,” he answered, tossing his head back
   in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. “No, I
   won’t send it anywhere.”
   
   Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the
   thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his
   heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. “Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why?
   Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the
   world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to
   throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world
   worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait
   like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the
   old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.”
   
   “I know you will laugh at me,” he replied, “but I really can’t exhibit it. I
   have put too much of myself into it.”
   
   Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.
   
   “Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same.”
   
   “Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn’t know you were so
   vain; and I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged
   strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if
   he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a
   Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression and
   all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression
   begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the
   harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose,
   or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of
   the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course,
   in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on
   saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of
   eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.
   Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose
   picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is
   some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we
   have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something
   to chill our intelligence. Don’t flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the
   least like him.”
   
   “You don’t understand me, Harry,” answered the artist. “Of course I am not
   like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be sorry to look like
   him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the truth. There is a
   fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of
   fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It
   is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid
   have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the
   play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge
   of defeat. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and
   without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it
   from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my
   art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks—we shall all suffer
   for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”
   
   “Dorian Gray? Is that his name?” asked Lord Henry, walking across the studio
   towards Basil Hallward.
   
   “Yes, that is his name. I didn’t intend to tell it to you.”
   
   
   


 * CHAPTER TWO
   
   June 21st, 2023
   
   “Oh, I can’t explain. When I like people immensely, I never tell their names
   to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love
   secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or
   marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
   When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I
   would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it
   seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life. I suppose you think
   me awfully foolish about it?”
   
   “Not at all,” answered Lord Henry, “not at all, my dear Basil. You seem to
   forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a
   life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where
   my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet—we do meet
   occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke’s—we tell
   each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is
   very good at it—much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets confused over
   her dates, and I always do. But when she does find me out, she makes no row
   at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me.”
   
   “I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry,” said Basil
   Hallward, strolling towards the door that led into the garden. “I believe
   that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed
   of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral
   thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.”
   
   “Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,” cried
   Lord Henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the garden together
   and ensconced themselves on a long bamboo seat that stood in the shade of a
   tall laurel bush. The sunlight slipped over the polished leaves. In the
   grass, white daisies were tremulous.
   
   After a pause, Lord Henry pulled out his watch. “I am afraid I must be going,
   Basil,” he murmured, “and before I go, I insist on your answering a question
   I put to you some time ago.”
   
   “What is that?” said the painter, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.
   
   “You know quite well.”
   
   “I do not, Harry.”
   
   



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