ian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this
book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought
to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than nine
large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different
colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing
fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost
entirely lost control. The hero, the wonderful young Parisian, in whom
the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended,
became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the
whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written
before he had lived it.

In one point he was more fortunate than the novel's fantastic hero. He
never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhat
grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still
water, which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life, and was
occasioned by the sudden decay of a beauty that had once, apparently,
been so remarkable. It was with an almost cruel joy--and perhaps in
nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its
place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its really
tragic, if somewhat over-emphasised, account of the sorrow and despair
of one who had himself lost what in others, and in the world, he had
most dearly valued.

For the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward, and many
others besides him, seemed never to leave him. Even those who had heard
the most evil things against him, and from time to time strange rumours
about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of
the clubs, could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw
him. He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from
the world. Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered
the room. There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked
them. His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the
innocence that they had tarnished. They wondered how one so charming and
graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at
once sordid and sensual.

Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged
absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were
his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep
upstairs to the locked r