Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large
button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady
Narborough's drawing-room by bowing servants. His forehead was throbbing
with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his manner
as he bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful as ever.
Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.
Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could have believed
that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of our age.
Those finely shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for sin,
nor those smiling lips have cried out on God and goodness. He himself
could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a moment
felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.

It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough,
who was a very clever woman with what Lord Henry used to describe
as the remains of really remarkable ugliness. She had proved
an excellent wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having
buried her husband properly in a marble mausoleum, which she
had herself designed, and married off her daughters to some rich,
rather elderly men, she devoted herself now to the pleasures
of French fiction, French cookery, and French esprit when she could
get it.

Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him
that she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life.
"I know, my dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you,"
she used to say, "and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake.
It is most fortunate that you were not thought of at the time.
As it was, our bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were
so occupied in trying to raise the wind, that I never had even a
flirtation with anybody. However, that was all Narborough's fault.
He was dreadfully short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking
in a husband who never sees anything."

Her guests this evening were rather tedious. The fact was,
as she explained to Dorian, behind a very shabby fan,
one of her married daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay
with her, and, to make matters worse, had actually brought her
husband with her. "I think it is most unkind of her, my dear,"
she whispered. "Of course I go and stay with them every summer
after I come from Homburg, but then an old woman like me must
have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake them up.
You don't know what an existence they lead down there.
It is pure unadulterated country life. They get up early,
because they have so much to do, and go to bed early,
because they have so little to think about. There has not