Chapter 11
For years, Dorian 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 han 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 ging fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost trol. The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantid the stific temperaments were sely blended, became to him a kind uring type of himself. And, ihe whole book seemed to him to taiory of his own life, written before he had lived it.
In one point he was more fortuhan the novels 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 beau 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 overemphasized, at of the sorrow and despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and the world, he had most dearly valued.
For the wonderful beauty that had so fasated Basil Hallward, and many others besides him, seemed o 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 ehe 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 innoce that they had tarhey wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of ahat was at once sordid and sensual.
Often, ourning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absehat gave rise to such strange jecture among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging fa the vas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the trast used to qui his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his owy, more and more ied in the corruption of his own soul. He would examih minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lihat seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, w sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.
There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately sted chamber, or in the sordid room of the little ill-famed taverhe docks which, under an assumed name and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon