Chapter 19
There is no use your tellihat yoing to be good," cried Lord Henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl filled with rose-water. "You are quite perfect. Pray, dont ge."
Dorian Gray shook his head. "No, Harry, I have dooo many dreadful things in my life. I am not going to do any more. I began my good as yesterday."
"Where were you yesterday?"
"In the try, Harry. I was staying at a little inn by myself."
"My dear boy," said Lord Henry, smiling, "anybody be good in the try. There are ations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. try people have no opportunity of beiher, so they stagnate."
"Culture and corruption," echoed Dorian. "I have known something of both. It seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found together. For I have a new ideal, Harry. I am going to alter. I think I have altered."
"You have not yet told me what yood a was. Or did you say you had done more than one?" asked his panion as he spilled into his plate a little crimson pyramid of seeded strawberries and, through a perforated, shell-shaped spoon, snowed white sugar upon them.
"I tell you, Harry. It is not a story I could tell to any one else. I spared somebody. It sounds vain, but you uand what I mean. She was quite beautiful and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane. I think it was that which first attracted me to her. You remember Sibyl, dont you? How long ago that seems! Well, Hetty was not one of our own class, of course. She was simply a girl in a village. But I really loved her. I am quite sure that I loved her. All during this wonderful May that we have been having, I used to run down and see her two or three times a week. Yesterday she met me in a little orchard. The apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was laughing. We were to have gone away together this m at dawn. Suddenly I determio leave her as flowerlike as I had found her."
"I should think the y of the emotion must have given you a thrill of real pleasure, Dorian," interrupted Lord Henry. "But I finish your idyll for you. You gave her good advid broke her heart. That was the beginning of your reformation."
"Harry, you are horrible! You mustnt say these dreadful things. Hettys heart is not broken. Of course, she cried and all that. But there is no disgrace upon her. She live, like Perdita, in her garden of mint and marigold."
"And weep over a faithless Florizel," said Lord Henry, laughing, as he leaned ba his chair. "My dear Dorian, you have the most curiously boyish moods. Do you think this girl will ever be really tent now with any one of her own rank? I suppose she will be married some day th carter rinning ploughman. Well, the fact of havi you, and loved you, will teach her to despise her husband, and she will be wretched. From a moral point of view, I ot say that I think much of yreat renunciation. Even as a beginning, it is poor. Besides, how do you know that Hetty isnt floating at the present moment in some starlit mill-pond, with lovely water-lilies round her, like Ophelia?"
"I t bear this, Harry! You mock at everything, and then suggest the most serious tragedies. I am sorry I told you now. I dont care what you say to me. I know I was right in ag as I did. Poor Hetty!