CHAPTER 15

That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady Narborough’s 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 hostess’s hand was as easy and graceful as ever.  Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s 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 our age.  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 wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.

It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough, 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 fiction, 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 bonnet right over the mills for your sake.  It is most fortunate that you were not thought of at the time.  As it was, our bonnets were so unbecoming, 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 Narborough’s 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 explained to Dorian, behind a very shabby fan, one of her married daughters had come 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 come from Homburg, but then an old woman like me must have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake them up.  You don’t know what an existence they lead down there.  It is pure unadulterated country 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 scandal in the neighbourhood since the time of Queen Elizabeth, and consequently they all fall asleep after dinner.  You shan’t sit next either of them.  You shall sit by me and amuse me.”