trous as orchids and as subtle in
colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical
philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the
spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions
of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of
incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The
mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so
full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated,
produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter,
a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of
the falling day and creeping shadows.

Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed
through the windows. He read on by its wan light till he could read no
more. Then, after his valet had reminded him several times of the
lateness of the hour, he got up, and going into the next room, placed
the book on the little Florentine table that always stood at his
bedside and began to dress for dinner.

It was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he found
Lord Henry sitting alone, in the morning-room, looking very much bored.

"I am so sorry, Harry," he cried, "but really it is entirely your
fault. That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the
time was going."

"Yes, I thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from his
chair.

"I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a
great difference."

"Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry. And they passed
into the dining-room.

CHAPTER 11

For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of
this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never
sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than
nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in
different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the
changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have
almost entirely lost control. The hero, the wonderful young Parisian
in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely
blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And,
indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own
life, written before he had lived it.

In one point he was more fortunate than the novel's fantastic