"Was that a paradox?" asked Mr. Erskine. "I did not think so. Perhaps it
was. Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we
must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can
judge them."

"Dear me!" said Lady Agatha, "how you men argue! I am sure I never can
make out what you are talking about. Oh! Harry, I am quite vexed with
you. Why do you try to persuade our nice Mr. Dorian Gray to give up the
East End? I assure you he would be quite invaluable. They would love his
playing."

"I want him to play to me," cried Lord Henry, smiling, and he looked
down the table and caught a bright answering glance.

"But they are so unhappy in Whitechapel," continued Lady Agatha.

"I can sympathize with everything except suffering," said Lord Henry,
shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly,
too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the
modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the
beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores, the better."

"Still, the East End is a very important problem," remarked Sir Thomas
with a grave shake of the head.

"Quite so," answered the young lord. "It is the problem of slavery, and
we try to solve it by amusing the slaves."

The politician looked at him keenly. "What change do you propose, then?"
he asked.

Lord Henry laughed. "I don't desire to change anything in England except
the weather," he answered. "I am quite content with philosophic
contemplation. But, as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt through
an over-expenditure of sympathy, I would suggest that we should appeal
to science to put us straight. The advantage of the emotions is that
they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not
emotional."

"But we have such grave responsibilities," ventured Mrs. Vandeleur timidly.

"Terribly grave," echoed Lady Agatha.

Lord Henry looked over at Mr. Erskine. "Humanity takes itself too
seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how
to laugh, history would have been different."

"You are really very comforting," warbled the duchess. "I have always
felt rather guilty when I came to see your dear aunt, for I take no
interest at all in the East End. For the future I shall be able to look
her in the face without a blush."

"A blush is very becoming, Duchess," remarked Lord Henry.

"Only when one is young," she answered. "When an old woman like myself
blushes, it is a very bad sign. Ah! Lord Henry, I wish you would tell me
how to become young again."

He thought for a moment. "Can you remember any great error that you
committed in your early days, Duchess?" he asked, looking at her across
the table.

"A great many, I fear," she cried.

"Then commit them over again," he said gravely. "To get back one's
youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies."

"A delightful theory!" she exclaimed. "I must put it into practice."

"A dangerous theory!" came from Sir Thomas's tight lips. Lady Agatha
shook her head, but could not help being amused. Mr. Erskine listened.

"Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays
most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it
is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

A laugh ran round the table.

He played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and
transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with
fancy and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on,
soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and
catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her
wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the
hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled
before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge
press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round
her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over
the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary
improvisation. He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him,
and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose
temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and
to lend colour to his imagination. He was brilliant, fantastic,
irresponsible. He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they
followed his pipe, laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him,
but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips
and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes.

At last, liveried in the costume of the age, reality entered the room in
the shape of a servant to tell the duchess that her carriage was


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