Pagina 284 de 490

Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and

prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture

among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so,

he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door

with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror,

in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him,

looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at

the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished

glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his

sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own

beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own

soul. He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a

monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the

wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth,

wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of

sin or the signs of age.