know him--came to me last year to have his portrait done. I had
never seen him before, and had never heard anything about him at the
time, though I have heard a good deal since. He offered an extravagant
price. I refused him. There was something in the shape of his fingers
that I hated. I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied
about him. His life is dreadful. But you, Dorian, with your pure,
bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth--I can't
believe anything against you. And yet I see you very seldom, and you
never come down to the studio now, and when I am away from you, and I
hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I
don't know what to say. Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of
Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? Why is it that so
many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house or invite you to
theirs? You used to be a friend of Lord Staveley. I met him at dinner
last week. Your name happened to come up in conversation, in
connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the
Dudley. Staveley curled his lip and said that you might have the most
artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl
should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the
same room with. I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked
him what he meant. He told me. He told me right out before everybody.
It was horrible! Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There
was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were
his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England
with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian
Singleton and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent's only son and
his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James's Street. He
seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of
Perth? What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would
associate with him?"

"Stop, Basil. You are talking about things of which you know nothing,"
said Dorian Gray, biting his lip, and with a note of infinite contempt
in his voice. "You ask me why Berwick leaves a room when I enter it.
It is because I know everything about his life, not because he knows
anything about mine. With such blood as he has in his veins, how could
his record be clean? You ask me about Henry Ashton and young Perth.
Did