"The betting is on the Americans."

"They don't last, I am told," muttered his uncle.

"A long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a
steeplechase. They take things flying. I don't think Dartmoor has a chance."

"Who are her people?" grumbled the old gentleman. "Has she got any?"

Lord Henry shook his head. "American girls are as clever at concealing
their parents, as English women are at concealing their past," he said,
rising to go.

"They are pork-packers, I suppose?"

"I hope so, Uncle George, for Dartmoor's sake. I am told that
pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in America, after politics."

"Is she pretty?"

"She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the
secret of their charm."

"Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are
always telling us that it is the paradise for women."

"It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively
anxious to get out of it," said Lord Henry. "Good-bye, Uncle George. I
shall be late for lunch, if I stop any longer. Thanks for giving me the
information I wanted. I always like to know everything about my new
friends, and nothing about my old ones."

"Where are you lunching, Harry?"

"At Aunt Agatha's. I have asked myself and Mr. Gray. He is her latest
protege."

"Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with her
charity appeals. I am sick of them. Why, the good woman thinks that I
have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads."

"All right, Uncle George, I'll tell her, but it won't have any effect.
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their
distinguishing characteristic."

The old gentleman growled approvingly and rang the bell for his servant.
Lord Henry passed up the low arcade into Burlington Street and turned
his steps in the direction of Berkeley Square.

So that was the story of Dorian Gray's parentage. Crudely as it had been
told to him, it had yet stirred him by its suggestion of a strange,
almost modern romance. A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad
passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous,
treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in
pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and
the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes; it was an interesting
background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect, as it were. Behind
every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds
had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow. . . . And how
charming he had been at dinner the night before, as with startled eyes
and lips parted in frightened pleasure he had sat opposite to him at the
club, the red candleshades staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder
of his face. Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin.
He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow. . . . There was
something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other
activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and
let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views
echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to
convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid
or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most
satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an
age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....
He was a marvellous type, too, this lad, whom by so curious a chance he
had met in Basil's studio, or could be fashioned into a marvellous type,
at any rate. Grace was his, and the white purity of boyhood, and beauty
such as old Greek marbles kept for us. There was nothing that one could
not do with him. He could be made a Titan or a toy. What a pity it was
that such beauty was destined to fade! . . . And Basil? From a
psychological point of view, how interesting he was! The new manner in
art, the fresh mode of looking at life, suggested so strangely by the
merely visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent
spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field,
suddenly showing herself, Dryadlike and not afraid, because in his soul
who sought for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which
alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of
things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical
value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more
perfect form whose shadow they made real: how strange it all was! He
remembered something like it in history. Was it not Plato, that artist
in thought, who had first analyzed it? Was it not Buonarotti who had
carved it in the coloured marbles of a sonnet-sequence? But in our own
century it was strange. . . . Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray
what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned
the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him--had already,
indeed, half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own. There
was something fascinating in this son of love and death.

Suddenly he stopped and glanced up at the houses. He found that he had
passed his aunt's some distance, and, smiling to himself, turned back.
When he entered the somewhat sombre hall, the butler told him that they


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