The Picture of Dorian Gray: Chapters 12-20

I remember Harry saying once that every man who turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always began by saying that, and then proceeded to break his word. I do want to preach to you.

Your name was implicated in the most terrible confession I ever read.

I know the age better than you do, though you will prate about it so tediously.

"This is blasphemy, Dorian!" he cried.

If he had done a tithe of what was rumoured about him, how much he must have suffered!

It was some foul parody, some infamous ignoble satire.

It was dank with clammy sweat.

"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were to me such an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of a satyr."

He could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet.

There he paused, hearing the slow heavy tread of the policeman on the pavement outside and seeing the flash of the bull's-eye reflected in the window.

Time seemed to him to be crawling with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice.

In a few moments, Alan Campbell walked in, looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.

What you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs—to destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left.

If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject.

You don't know what an existence they lead down there. It is pure unadulterated country life.

"Oh! she is audacious enough for anything, my dear. And what is Ferrol like? I don't know him."

"If he had been, you would not have loved him, my dear lady," was the rejoinder.

"You must come and dine with me soon again. You are really an admirable tonic, much better than what Sir Andrew prescribes for me. You must tell me what people you would like to meet, though. I want it to be a delightful gathering."

The word doctrinaire—word full of terror to the British mind—reappeared from time to time between his explosions.

An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.

The inherited stupidity of the race—sound English common sense he jovially termed it—was shown to be the proper bulwark for society.

"All right, sir," answered the man, "you will be there in an hour," and after his fare had got in he turned his horse round and drove rapidly towards the river.

Certainly with hideous iteration the bitten lips of Dorian Gray shaped and reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul and sense, till he had found in them the full expression, as it were, of his mood, and justified, by intellectual approval, passions that without such justification would still have dominated his temper.

"This will do," he answered, and having got out hastily and given the driver the extra fare he had promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the quay.

His meeting with Adrian Singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door, as Basil Hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult.

"Why, man, it's nigh on eighteen years since Prince Charming made me what I am."

"Strike me dumb if it ain't so. He is the worst one that comes here. They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face. It's nigh on eighteen years since I met him. He hasn't changed much since then. I have, though," she added, with a sickly leer.

A week later Dorian Gray was sitting in the conservatory at Selby Royal, talking to the pretty Duchess of Monmouth, who with her husband, a jaded-looking man of sixty, was amongst his guests.

"Royalties may not abdicate," fell as a warning from pretty lips.

"They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy."

"Pace gives life," was the riposte.

"You fill me with apprehension. The appeal to antiquity is fatal to us who are romanticists."

"Let us go and help him. I have not yet told him the colour of my frock."

And with fear in his eyes, Lord Henry rushed through the flapping palms to find Dorian Gray lying face downwards on the tiled floor in a deathlike swoon.

There was a wild recklessness of gaiety in his manner as he sat at table, but now and then a thrill of terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the face of James Vane watching him.

He had sailed away in his ship to founder in some winter sea.

The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

The trees seemed to sweep past him in spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across his path.

"But I can finish your idyll for you. You gave her good advice and broke her heart. That was the beginning of your reformation."

"But I can finish your idyll for you. You gave her good advice and broke her heart. That was the beginning of your reformation."

From a moral point of view, I cannot say that I think much of your great renunciation.

You remind me of the day I saw you first. You were rather cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary.

Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth!

Why had he worn its livery?

He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.