forget that."

"I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than
anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have
emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all
the same. They love being dominated. I am sure you were splendid. I have
never seen you really and absolutely angry, but I can fancy how
delightful you looked. And, after all, you said something to me the day
before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely fanciful,
but that I see now was absolutely true, and it holds the key to
everything."

"What was that, Harry?"

"You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines of
romance--that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that
if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen."

"She will never come to life again now," muttered the lad, burying his
face in his hands.

"No, she will never come to life. She has played her last part. But you
must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a
strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene
from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived,
and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a
dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and left them
lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare's music
sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life,
she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away. Mourn for
Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was
strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio
died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than
they are."

There was a silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly, and
with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden. The colours
faded wearily out of things.

After some time Dorian Gray looked up. "You have explained me to myself,
Harry," he murmured, with something of a sigh of relief. "I felt all
that you have said, but somehow I was afraid of it, and I could not
express it to myself. How well you know me! But we will not talk again
of what has happened. It has been a marvellous experience. That is all.
I wonder if life has still in store for me anything as marvellous."

"Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that
you, with your extraordinary good looks, wi