ed so badly, and my heart almost broke. She explained it all to me.
It was terribly pathetic. But I was not moved a bit. I thought her
shallow. Suddenly something happened that made me afraid. I can't tell
you what it was, but it was terrible. I said I would go back to her. I
felt I had done wrong. And now she is dead. My God! my God! Harry, what
shall I do? You don't know the danger I am in, and there is nothing to
keep me straight. She would have done that for me. She had no right to
kill herself. It was selfish of her."
"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette from his case,
and producing a gold-latten matchbox, "the only way a woman can ever
reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible
interest in life. If you had married this girl you would have been
wretched. Of course you would have treated her kindly. One can always be
kind to people about whom one cares nothing. But she would have soon
found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. And when a woman
finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy,
or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay
for. I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been
abject, which, of course, I would not have allowed, but I assure you
that in any case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure."
"I suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room,
and looking horribly pale. "But I thought it was my duty. It is not my
fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was right.
I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good
resolutions--that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were."
"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific
laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely _nil_.
They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions
that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for
them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no
account."
"Harry," cried Dorian Gray, coming over and sitting down beside him,
"why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to? I don't
think I am heartless. Do you?"
"You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be
entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian," answered Lord Henry, with
his sweet, melancholy smile.
The lad frowned. "I don'
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