He told me right out before everybody.  It was horrible!  Why is your friendship so fateful to young men?  There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide.  You were his great friend.  There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name.  You and he were inseparable.  What about Adrian Singleton, and his dreadful end?  What about Lord Kent’s only son, and his career?  I met his father yesterday in St. James Street.  He seemed broken with shame and sorrow.  What about the young Duke of Perth?  What sort of life has he got now?  What gentleman would associate with him?  Dorian, Dorian, your reputation is infamous.  I know you and Harry are great friends.  I say nothing about that now, but [80] surely you need not have made his sister’s name a by-word.  When you met Lady Gwendolen, not a breath of scandal had ever touched her.  Is there a single decent woman in London now who would drive with her in the Park?  Why, even her children are not allowed to live with her.  Then there are other stories,—­stories that you have been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest dens in London.  Are they true?  Can they be true?  When I first heard them, I laughed.  I hear them now, and they make me shudder.  What about your country-house, and the life that is led there?  Dorian, you don’t know what is said about you.  I won’t tell you that I don’t want to preach to you.  I remember Harry saying once that every man who turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always said that, and then broke his word.  I do want to preach to you.  I want you to lead such a life as will make the world respect you.  I want you to have a clean name and a fair record.  I want you to get rid of the dreadful people you associate with.  Don’t shrug your shoulders like that.  Don’t be so indifferent.  You have a wonderful influence.  Let it be for good, not for evil.  They say that you corrupt every one whom you become intimate with, and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house, for shame of some kind to follow after you.  I don’t know whether it is so or not.  How should I know?  But it is said of you.  I am told things that it seems impossible to doubt.  Lord Gloucester was one of my greatest friends at Oxford.  He showed me a letter that his wife had written to him when she was dying alone in her villa at Mentone.  Your name was implicated in the most terrible confession I ever read.  I told him that it was absurd,—­that I knew you thoroughly, and that you were incapable of anything of the kind.  Know you?  I wonder do I know you?  Before I could answer that, I should have to see your soul.”

“To see my soul!” muttered Dorian Gray, starting up from the sofa and turning almost white from fear.

“Yes,” answered Hallward, gravely, and with infinite sorrow in his voice,—­“to see your soul.  But only God can do that.”