“My dear Dorian,” answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette from his case and producing a gold-latten matchbox, “the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.  If you had married this girl, you would have been wretched.  Of course, you would have treated her kindly.  One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.  But she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her.  And when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman’s husband has to pay for.  I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been abject—­which, of course, I would not have allowed—­ but I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure.”

“I suppose it would,” muttered the lad, walking up and down the room and looking horribly pale.  “But I thought it was my duty.  It is not my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was right.  I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions—­that they are always made too late.  Mine certainly were.”

“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.  Their origin is pure vanity.  Their result is absolutely nil.  They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.  That is all that can be said for them.  They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”

“Harry,” cried Dorian Gray, coming over and sitting down beside him, “why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to?  I don’t think I am heartless.  Do you?”

“You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian,” answered Lord Henry with his sweet melancholy smile.

The lad frowned.  “I don’t like that explanation, Harry,” he rejoined, “but I am glad you don’t think I am heartless.  I am nothing of the kind.  I know I am not.  And yet I must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should.  It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play.  It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded.”

“It is an interesting question,” said Lord Henry, who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad’s unconscious egotism, “an extremely interesting question.  I fancy that the true explanation is this:  It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.  They affect us just as vulgarity affects us.  They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.