He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken or grow mad.  There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.  But this was not one of them.  It was a thing to be driven out of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle one itself.

He passed his hand across his forehead, and then got up hastily, and dressed himself with even more than his usual attention, giving a good deal of care to the selection of his necktie and scarf-pin, and changing his rings more than once.

He spent a long time over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of [87] getting made for the servants at Selby, and going through his correspondence.  Over some of the letters he smiled.  Three of them bored him.  One he read several times over, and then tore up with a slight look of annoyance in his face.  “That awful thing, a woman’s memory!” as Lord Henry had once said.

When he had drunk his coffee, he sat down at the table, and wrote two letters.  One he put in his pocket, the other he handed to the valet.

“Take this round to 152, Hertford Street, Francis, and if Mr. Campbell is out of town, get his address.”

As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette, and began sketching upon a piece of paper, drawing flowers, and bits of architecture, first, and then faces.  Suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have an extraordinary likeness to Basil Hallward.  He frowned, and, getting up, went over to the bookcase and took out a volume at hazard.  He was determined that he would not think about what had happened, till it became absolutely necessary to do so.

When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page of the book.  It was Gautier’s “Emaux et Camees,” Charpentier’s Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching.  The binding was of citron-green leather with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates.  It had been given to him by Adrian Singleton.  As he turned over the pages his eye fell on the poem about the hand of Lacenaire, the cold yellow hand “du supplice encore mal lavee,” with its downy red hairs and its “doigts de faune.”  He glanced at his own white taper fingers, and passed on, till he came to those lovely verses upon Venice: 

     Sur une gamme chromatique,
        Le sein de perles ruisselant,
     La Venus de l’Adriatique
        Sort de l’eau son corps rose et blanc.

     Les domes, sur l’azur des ondes
        Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
     S’enflent comme des gorges rondes
        Que souleve un soupir d’amour.

     L’esquif aborde et me depose,
        Jetant son amarre au pilier,
     Devant une facade rose,
        Sur le marbre d’un escalier.