e always very old and very ugly. What a laugh she
had!--just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had been in her
cotton dresses and her large hats! She knew nothing, but she had
everything that he had lost.

When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. He sent
him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and began
to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.

Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing
for the unstained purity of his boyhood--his rose-white boyhood, as Lord
Henry had once called it. He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled
his mind with corruption, and given horror to his fancy; that he had
been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in
being so; and that, of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been
the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame.
But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?

Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that
the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the
unsullied splendour of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to
that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure,
swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not
"Forgive us our sins," but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be the
prayer of a man to a most just God.

The curiously carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so many
years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed Cupids
laughed round it as of old. He took it up, as he had done on that night
of horror, when he had first noted the change in the fatal picture, and
with wild, tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished shield. Once, some
one who had terribly loved him had written to him a mad letter, ending
with these idolatrous words: "The world is changed because you are made
of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history." The phrases
came back to his memory, and he repeated them over and over to himself.
Then he loathed his own beauty, and, flinging the mirror on the floor,
crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel. It was his beauty
that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for.
But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His
beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was
youth at best? A green, an un