urs. Never trust a woman who
wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who
is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history.
Others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good
qualities of their husbands. They flaunt their conjugal felicity in
one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. Religion
consoles some. Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a
woman once told me, and I can quite understand it. Besides, nothing
makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes
egotists of us all. Yes; there is really no end to the consolations
that women find in modern life. Indeed, I have not mentioned the most
important one."

"What is that, Harry?" said the lad listlessly.

"Oh, the obvious consolation. Taking some one else's admirer when one
loses one's own. In good society that always whitewashes a woman. But
really, Dorian, how different Sibyl Vane must have been from all the
women one meets! There is something to me quite beautiful about her
death. I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen.
They make one believe in the reality of the things we all play with,
such as romance, passion, and love."

"I was terribly cruel to her. You forget that."

"I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more
than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We
have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their
masters, all the same. They love being dominated. I am sure you were
splendid. I have never seen you really and absolutely angry, but I can
fancy how delightful you looked. And, after all, you said something to
me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely
fanciful, but that I see now was absolutely true, and it holds the key
to everything."

"What was that, Harry?"

"You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines of
romance--that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that
if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen."

"She will never come to life again now," muttered the lad, burying his
face in his hands.

"No, she will never come to life. She has played her last part. But
you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply
as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful
scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never re