oom, open the door with the key that never left
him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil
Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and ageing face on
the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from
the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken
his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own
beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He
would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and
terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead,
or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which
were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. He would
place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture,
and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.

There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own
delicately-scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little
ill-famed tavern near the Docks, which, under an assumed name, and in
disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he
had brought upon his soul, with a pity that was all the more poignant
because it was purely selfish. But moments such as these were rare. That
curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred in him, as they
sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase with
gratification. The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad
hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.

Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to society.
Once or twice every month during the winter, and on each Wednesday
evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the world his
beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day to
charm his guests with the wonders of their art. His little dinners, in
the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were noted as much
for the careful selection and placing of those invited, as for the
exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table, with its subtle
symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered cloths, and
antique plate of gold and silver. Indeed, there were many, especially
among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw, in Dorian
Gray the true realisation of a type of which they had often dreamed in
Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine somethin