room, which had been specially built by the last Lord
Kelso for the use of the little grandson whom, for his strange likeness
to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always hated and
desired to keep at a distance. It appeared to Dorian to have but little
changed. There was the huge Italian _cassone_, with its
fantastically-painted panels and its tarnished gilt mouldings, in which
he had so often hidden himself as a boy. There the satinwood bookcase
filled with his dog-eared schoolbooks. On the wall behind it was hanging
the same ragged Flemish tapestry, where a faded king and queen were
playing chess in a garden, while a company of hawkers rode by, carrying
hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists. How well he remembered it all!
Every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him as he looked
round. He recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it
seemed horrible to him that it was here the fatal portrait was to be
hidden away. How little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that
was in store for him!

But there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as
this. He had the key, and no one else could enter it. Beneath its purple
pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and
unclean. What did it matter? No one could see it. He himself would not
see it. Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? He kept
his youth--that was enough. And, besides, might not his nature grow
finer, after all? There was no reason that the future should be so full
of shame. Some love might come across his life, and purify him, and
shield him from those sins that seemed to be already stirring in spirit
and in flesh--those curious unpictured sins whose very mystery lent them
their subtlety and their charm. Perhaps, some day, the cruel look would
have passed away from the scarlet sensitive mouth, and he might show to
the world Basil Hallward's masterpiece.

No; that was impossible. Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon
the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but
the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would become
hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow's-feet would creep round the fading eyes
and make them horrible. The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth
would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men
are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands,
the twisted body, that