m the memory of the ihat they had tarhey wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of ahat was at once sordid and sensual.
Often, home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absehat gave rise to such strange jecture among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging fa the vas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the trast used to qui his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his owy, more and more ied in the corruption of his own soul. He would examih minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lihat seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, w sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.
There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately sted chamber, or in the sordid room of the little ill-famed taverhe docks which, under an assumed name and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul with a pity that was all the more poignant because it urely selfish. But moments such as these were rare. That curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase with gratification. The more he khe more he desired to know. He had mad huhat grew more ravenous as he fed them.
Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to society. Once or twice every month during the winter, and