loved her once! It seems years ago to me now. She was everything to me.
Then came that dreadful night--was it really only last night?-- when she
played so badly, and my heart almost broke. She explained it all to me.
It was terribly pathetic. But I was not moved a bit. I thought her
shallow. Suddenly something happened that made me afraid. I can't tell
you what it was, but it was terrible. I said I would go back to her. I
felt I had done wrong. And now she is dead. My God! My God! Harry, what
shall I do? You don't know the danger I am in, and there is nothing to
keep me straight. She would have done that for me. She had no right to
kill herself. It was selfish of her."

"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette from his case
and producing a gold-latten matchbox, "the only way a woman can ever
reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible
interest in life. If you had married this girl, you would have been
wretched. Of course, you would have treated her kindly. One can always
be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. But she would have soon
found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. And when a woman
finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy,
or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay
for. I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been
abject--which, of course, I would not have allowed-- but I assure you
that in any case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure."

"I suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room and
looking horribly pale. "But I thought it was my duty. It is not my fault
that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was right. I
remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good
resolutions--that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were."

"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific
laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They
give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that
have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for
them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no
account."

"Harry," cried Dorian Gray, coming over and sitting down beside him,
"why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to? I don't
think I am heartless. Do you?"

"You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be
entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian," answered Lord Henry with
his sweet melancholy smile.

The lad frowned. "I don't like that explanation, Harry," he rejoined,
"but I am glad you don't think I am heartless. I am nothing of the kind.
I know I am not. And yet I must admit that this thing that has happened
does not affect me as it should. It seems to me to be simply like a
wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of
a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I
have not been wounded."

"It is an interesting question," said Lord Henry, who found an exquisite
pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism, "an extremely
interesting question. I fancy that the true explanation is this: It
often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an
inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of
style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an
impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes,
however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses
our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply
appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no
longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are
both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls
us. In the present case, what is it that has really happened? Some one
has killed herself for love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an
experience. It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my
life. The people who have adored me--there have not been very many, but
there have been some--have always insisted on living on, long after I
had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me. They have become
stout and tedious, and when I meet them, they go in at once for
reminiscences. That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is!
And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb
the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details
are always vulgar."

"I must sow poppies in my garden," sighed Dorian.

"There is no necessity," rejoined his companion. "Life has always
poppies in her hands. Of course, now and then things linger. I once wore
nothing but violets all through one season, as a form of artistic
mourning for a romance that would not die. Ultimately, however, it did
die. I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to sacrifice
the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. It fills one
with the terror of eternity. Well--would you believe it?--a week ago, at
Lady Hampshire's, I found myself seated at dinner next the lady in
question, and she insisted on going over the whole thing again, and
digging up the past, and raking up the future. I had buried my romance
in a bed of asphodel. She dragged it out again and assured me that I had
spoiled her life. I am bound to state that she ate an enormous dinner,
so I did not feel any anxiety. But what a lack of taste she showed! The
one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know when
the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the
interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If
they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic
ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are
charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art. You are more
fortunate than I am. I assure you, Dorian, that not one of the women I


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