k, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said
Lord Henry languidly. "You must certainly send it next year to the
Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have
gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been
able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that
I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor
is really the only place."

"I don't think I shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head
back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at
Oxford. "No, I won't send it anywhere."

Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through
the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls
from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. "Not send it anywhere? My
dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters
are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as
you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you,
for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,
and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you
far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite
jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion."

"I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit
it. I have put too much of myself into it."

Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.

"Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same."

"Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you
were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between you, with
your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young
Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why,
my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you--well, of course you have an
intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends
where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode
of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one
sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something
horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions.
How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But
then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the
age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen,
and as a