ook that we had been
studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the
letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often.
Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night
comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where
we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the
necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of
stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might
open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the
darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh
shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in
which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate,
in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of
joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.

It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray
to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life; and in his
search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and
possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he
would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really
alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and
then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his
intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that
is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that indeed,
according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it.

It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic
communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction
for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices
of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of
the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its
elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to
symbolise. He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement, and watch
the priest, in his stiff flowered vestment, slowly and with white hands
moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled
lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one
would fain think, is indeed the "_panis caelestis_," the bread of angels,
or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ, breaki