“Where are you lunching, Harry?”

“At Aunt Agatha’s.  I have asked myself and Mr. Gray. 
He is her latest protege.”

“Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with her charity appeals.  I am sick of them.  Why, the good woman thinks that I have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads.”

“All right, Uncle George, I’ll tell her, but it won’t have any effect.  Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity.  It is their distinguishing characteristic.”

The old gentleman growled approvingly and rang the bell for his servant.  Lord Henry passed up the low arcade into Burlington Street and turned his steps in the direction of Berkeley Square.

So that was the story of Dorian Gray’s parentage.  Crudely as it had been told to him, it had yet stirred him by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance.  A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion.  A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime.  Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain.  The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man.  Yes; it was an interesting background.  It posed the lad, made him more perfect, as it were.  Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.  Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow. . . .  And how charming he had been at dinner the night before, as with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face.  Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin.  He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow. . . .  There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence.  No other activity was like it.  To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume:  there was a real joy in that—­perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....  He was a marvellous type, too, this lad, whom by so curious a chance he had met in Basil’s studio, or could be fashioned into a marvellous type, at any rate.  Grace was his, and the white purity of boyhood, and beauty such as old Greek marbles kept for us.  There was nothing that one could not do with him.  He could be made a Titan or a toy.  What a pity it was that such beauty was destined to fade! . . .  And Basil?  From a psychological point of view, how interesting he was!  The new manner in art, the fresh mode of looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit