to us that is not imitative!  Don’t stop.  I want music to-night.  It seems to me that you are the young Apollo and that I am Marsyas listening to you.  I have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of.  The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.  I am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity.  Ah, Dorian, how happy you are!  What an exquisite life you have had!  You have drunk deeply of everything.  You have crushed the grapes against your palate.  Nothing has been hidden from you.  And it has all been to you no more than the sound of music.  It has not marred you.  You are still the same.”

“I am not the same, Harry.”

“Yes, you are the same.  I wonder what the rest of your life will be.  Don’t spoil it by renunciations.  At present you are a perfect type.  Don’t make yourself incomplete.  You are quite flawless now.  You need not shake your head:  you know you are.  Besides, Dorian, don’t deceive yourself.  Life is not governed by will or intention.  Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.  You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong.  But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play—­ I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.  Browning writes about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us.  There are moments when the odour of lilas blanc passes suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest month of my life over again.  I wish I could change places with you, Dorian.  The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you.  It always will worship you.  You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found.  I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself!  Life has been your art.  You have set yourself to music.  Your days are your sonnets.”

Dorian rose up from the piano and passed his hand through his hair.  “Yes, life has been exquisite,” he murmured, “but I am not going to have the same life, Harry.  And you must not say these extravagant things to me.  You don’t know everything about me.  I think that if you did, even you would turn from me.  You laugh.  Don’t laugh.”

“Why have you stopped playing, Dorian?  Go back and give me the nocturne over again.  Look at that great, honey-coloured moon that hangs in the dusky air.  She is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she will come closer to the earth.  You won’t?  Let us go to the club, then.  It has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly.  There is some one at White’s who wants immensely to know you—­young Lord Poole, Bournemouth’s eldest son.  He has already copied your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you.  He is quite delightful and rather reminds me of you.”