Chapter 15
That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady Narbhs drawing-room by bowing servants. His forehead was throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his manner as he bent over his hostesss hand was as easy and graceful as ever. Perhaps one never seems so much at ones ease as when one has to play a part. Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of e. Those finely shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on God and goodness. He himself could not help w at the calm of his demeanour, and for a mome keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.
It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narbh, who was a very clever woman with what Lord Henry used to describe as the remains of really remarkable ugliness. She had proved an excellent wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having buried her husband properly in a marble mausoleum, which she had herself designed, and married off her daughters to some rich, rather elderly men, she devoted herself now to the pleasures of French fi, French cookery, and French esprit when she could get it.
Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him that she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life. "I know, my dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you," she used to say, "and thrown my bo right over the mills for your sake. It is most fortuhat you were not thought of at the time. As it was, our bos were so unbeing, and the mills were so occupied in trying to raise the wind, that I never had even a flirtation with anybody. However, that was all Narbhs fault. He was dreadfully short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking in a husband who never sees anything."
Her guests this evening were rather tedious. The fact was, as she explaio Dorian, behind a very shabby fan, one of her married daughters had e up quite suddenly to stay with her, and, to make matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her. "I think it is most unkind of her, my dear," she whispered. "Of course I go and stay with them every summer after I e from H, but then an old woman like me must have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake them up. You dont know what aehey lead down there. It is pure unadulterated try life. They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about. There has not been a sdal in the neighbourhood sihe time of Queen Elizabeth, and sequently they all fall asleep after dinner. You shant sit either of them. You shall sit by me and amuse me."
Dorian murmured a graceful pliment and looked round the room. Yes: it was certainly a tedious party. Two of the people he had never seen before, and the others sisted of Er Harrowden, one of those middle-aged mediocrities so on in London clubs who have no enemies, but are thhly disliked by their friends; Lady Ruxton, an overdressed woman of forty-seven, with a hooked nose, who was always trying to get herself promised, but was so peculiarly plain that treat disappoi no one would ever believe anything against her; Mrs. Erlynne, a pushing nobody, with a delightful lisp aian-red hair; Lady Alice Chapman, his hostesss daughter, a dowdy dull girl, with one of tho