, no," he cried petulantly. "Thank you, Leaf. That will do."
She lingered for a few moments, and was garrulous over some detail of the household. He sighed and told her to mahings as she thought best. She left the room, wreathed in smiles.
As the door closed, Dorian put the key in his pocket and looked round the room. His eye fell on a large, purple satin coverlet heavily embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seveh-tury Veian work that his grandfather had found in a vent near Bologna. Yes, that would serve to the dreadful thing in. It had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead. Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself-- something that would breed horrors a would never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the vas. They would mar its beauty a away its grace. They would defile it and make it shameful. Ahe thing would still live on. It would be always alive.
He shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told Basil the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away. Basil would have helped him to resist Lord Henrys influence, and the still more poisonous i came from his own temperament. The love that he bore him--for it was really love-- had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses and that dies when the seire. It was such love as Michelangelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself. Yes, Basil could have saved him. But it was too late now. The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or fetfulness could do that. But the future was iable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.
He took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold texture that covered it, a