that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing herself, Dryadlike and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real:  how strange it all was!  He remembered something like it in history.  Was it not Plato, that artist in thought, who had first analyzed it?  Was it not Buonarotti who had carved it in the coloured marbles of a sonnet-sequence?  But in our own century it was strange. . . .  Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait.  He would seek to dominate him—­had already, indeed, half done so.  He would make that wonderful spirit his own.  There was something fascinating in this son of love and death.

Suddenly he stopped and glanced up at the houses.  He found that he had passed his aunt’s some distance, and, smiling to himself, turned back.  When he entered the somewhat sombre hall, the butler told him that they had gone in to lunch.  He gave one of the footmen his hat and stick and passed into the dining-room.

“Late as usual, Harry,” cried his aunt, shaking her head at him.

He invented a facile excuse, and having taken the vacant seat next to her, looked round to see who was there.  Dorian bowed to him shyly from the end of the table, a flush of pleasure stealing into his cheek.  Opposite was the Duchess of Harley, a lady of admirable good-nature and good temper, much liked by every one who knew her, and of those ample architectural proportions that in women who are not duchesses are described by contemporary historians as stoutness.  Next to her sat, on her right, Sir Thomas Burdon, a Radical member of Parliament, who followed his leader in public life and in private life followed the best cooks, dining with the Tories and thinking with the Liberals, in accordance with a wise and well-known rule.  The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty.  His own neighbour was Mrs. Vandeleur, one of his aunt’s oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book.  Fortunately for him she had on the other side Lord Faudel, a most intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a ministerial statement in the House of Commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely earnest manner which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once himself, that all really good people fall into, and from which none of them ever quite escape.