Dorian Gray laughed, and tossed his head.  “You are quite incorrigible, Harry; but I don’t mind.  It is impossible to be angry with you.  When you see Sibyl Vane, you will feel that the man who could wrong her would be a beast, a beast without a heart.  I cannot understand how any one can wish to shame the thing he loves.  I love Sibyl Vane.  I want to place her on a pedestal of gold and to see the world worship the woman who is mine.  What is marriage?  An irrevocable vow.  You mock at it for that.  Ah! don’t mock.  It is an irrevocable vow that I want to take.  Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.  When I am with her, I regret all that you have taught me.  I become different from what you have known me to be.  I am changed, and the mere touch of Sibyl Vane’s hand makes me forget you and all your wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories.”

“And those are ... ?” asked Lord Henry, helping himself to some salad.

“Oh, your theories about life, your theories about love, your theories about pleasure.  All your theories, in fact, Harry.”

“Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about,” he answered in his slow melodious voice.  “But I am afraid I cannot claim my theory as my own.  It belongs to Nature, not to me.  Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval.  When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.”

“Ah! but what do you mean by good?” cried Basil Hallward.

“Yes,” echoed Dorian, leaning back in his chair and looking at Lord Henry over the heavy clusters of purple-lipped irises that stood in the centre of the table, “what do you mean by good, Harry?”

“To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self,” he replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers.  “Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.  One’s own life—­that is the important thing.  As for the lives of one’s neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one’s moral views about them, but they are not one’s concern.  Besides, individualism has really the higher aim.  Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age.  I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.”

“But, surely, if one lives merely for one’s self, Harry, one pays a terrible price for doing so?” suggested the painter.

“Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays.  I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial.  Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.”

“One has to pay in other ways but money.”

“What sort of ways, Basil?”

“Oh!  I should fancy in remorse, in suffering, in . . . well, in the consciousness of degradation.”

Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders.  “My dear fellow, mediaeval art is charming, but mediaeval emotions are out of date.  One can use them in fiction, of course.  But then the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact.  Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.”