y."

"But what about my man at the Orleans?"

The painter laughed. "I don't think there will be any difficulty about
that. Sit down again, Harry. And now, Dorian, get up on the platform,
and don't move about too much, or pay any attention to what Lord Henry
says. He has a very bad influence over all his friends, with the single
exception of myself."

Dorian Gray stepped up on the dais, with the air of a young Greek
martyr, and made a little _moue_ of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he
had rather taken a fancy. He was so unlike Basil. They made a delightful
contrast. And he had such a beautiful voice. After a few moments he said
to him, "Have you really a very bad influence, Lord Henry? As bad as
Basil says?"

"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is
immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view."

"Why?"

"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does
not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His
virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins,
are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a
part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is
self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly--that is what each
of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have
forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's
self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe
the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone
out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society,
which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of
religion--these are the two things that govern us. And yet----"

"Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good
boy," said the painter, deep in his work, and conscious only that a look
had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before.

"And yet," continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with
that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of him,
and that he had even in his Eton days, "I believe that if one man were
to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every
feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--I believe
that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would
forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the