“Because,” said Lord Henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt trellis of an open vinaigrette box, “one can survive everything nowadays except that.  Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.  Let us have our coffee in the music-room, Dorian.  You must play Chopin to me.  The man with whom my wife ran away played Chopin exquisitely.  Poor Victoria!  I was very fond of her.  The house is rather lonely without her.  Of course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit.  But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits.  Perhaps one regrets them the most.  They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”

Dorian said nothing, but rose from the table, and passing into the next room, sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the white and black ivory of the keys.  After the coffee had been brought in, he stopped, and looking over at Lord Henry, said, “Harry, did it ever occur to you that Basil was murdered?”

Lord Henry yawned.  “Basil was very popular, and always wore a Waterbury watch.  Why should he have been murdered?  He was not clever enough to have enemies.  Of course, he had a wonderful genius for painting.  But a man can paint like Velasquez and yet be as dull as possible.  Basil was really rather dull.  He only interested me once, and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild adoration for you and that you were the dominant motive of his art.”

“I was very fond of Basil,” said Dorian with a note of sadness in his voice.  “But don’t people say that he was murdered?”

“Oh, some of the papers do.  It does not seem to me to be at all probable.  I know there are dreadful places in Paris, but Basil was not the sort of man to have gone to them.  He had no curiosity.  It was his chief defect.”

“What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil?” said the younger man.  He watched him intently after he had spoken.

“I would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that doesn’t suit you.  All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.  It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder.  I am sorry if I hurt your vanity by saying so, but I assure you it is true.  Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders.  I don’t blame them in the smallest degree.  I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.”

“A method of procuring sensations?  Do you think, then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again?  Don’t tell me that.”