brother . . . No; never mind. He didn't mean it. He was in jest. . . .
But you, oh! can't you forgive me for to-night? I will work so hard and
try to improve. Don't be cruel to me, because I love you better than
anything in the world. After all, it is only once that I have not
pleased you. But you are quite right, Dorian. I should have shown myself
more of an artist. It was foolish of me, and yet I couldn't help it. Oh,
don't leave me, don't leave me." A fit of passionate sobbing choked her.
She crouched on the floor like a wounded thing, and Dorian Gray, with
his beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiselled lips curled in
exquisite disdain. There is always something ridiculous about the
emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him
to be absurdly melodramatic. Her tears and sobs annoyed him.

"I am going," he said at last in his calm clear voice. "I don't wish to
be unkind, but I can't see you again. You have disappointed me."

She wept silently, and made no answer, but crept nearer. Her little
hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be seeking for him. He
turned on his heel and left the room. In a few moments he was out of the
theatre.

Where he went to he hardly knew. He remembered wandering through dimly
lit streets, past gaunt, black-shadowed archways and evil-looking
houses. Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after
him. Drunkards had reeled by, cursing and chattering to themselves like
monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque children huddled upon door-steps,
and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts.

As the dawn was just breaking, he found himself close to Covent Garden.
The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed
itself into a perfect pearl. Huge carts filled with nodding lilies
rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. The air was heavy with
the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an
anodyne for his pain. He followed into the market and watched the men
unloading their waggons. A white-smocked carter offered him some
cherries. He thanked him, wondered why he refused to accept any money
for them, and began to eat them listlessly. They had been plucked at
midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them. A long
line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips, and of yellow and red
roses, defiled in front of him, threading their way through the huge,
jade-green piles of vegetables. Under the portico, with its grey,
sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls,
waiting for the auction to be over. Others crowded round the swinging
doors of the coffee-house in the piazza. The heavy cart-horses slipped
and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings.
Some of the drivers were lying asleep on a pile of sacks. Iris-necked
and pink-footed, the pigeons ran about picking up seeds.

After a little while, he hailed a hansom and drove home. For a few
moments he loitered upon the doorstep, looking round at the silent
square, with its blank, close-shuttered windows and its staring blinds.
The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like
silver against it. From some chimney opposite a thin wreath of smoke was
rising. It curled, a violet riband, through the nacre-coloured air.

In the huge gilt Venetian lantern, spoil of some Doge's barge, that hung
from the ceiling of the great, oak-panelled hall of entrance, lights
were still burning from three flickering jets: thin blue petals of flame
they seemed, rimmed with white fire. He turned them out and, having
thrown his hat and cape on the table, passed through the library towards
the door of his bedroom, a large octagonal chamber on the ground floor
that, in his new-born feeling for luxury, he had just had decorated for
himself and hung with some curious Renaissance tapestries that had been
discovered stored in a disused attic at Selby Royal. As he was turning
the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward
had painted of him. He started back as if in surprise. Then he went on
into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. After he had taken the
button-hole out of his coat, he seemed to hesitate. Finally, he came
back, went over to the picture, and examined it. In the dim arrested
light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face
appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different.
One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It
was certainly strange.

He turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. The
bright dawn flooded the room and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky
corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he
had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be
more intensified even. The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the
lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking
into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

He winced and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory
Cupids, one of Lord Henry's many presents to him, glanced hurriedly into
its polished depths. No line like that warped his red lips. What did it
mean?

He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it
again. There were no signs of any change when he looked into the actual
painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression had
altered. It was not a mere fancy of his own. The thing was horribly
apparent.

He threw himself into a chair and began to think. Suddenly there flashed
across his mind what he had said in Basil Hallward's studio the day the
picture had been finished. Yes, he remembered it perfectly. He had
uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait
grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the
canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted
image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that


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