Charm as Cover — The Picture of Dorian Gray

Lord Henry spends the late morning in his uncle Lord Fermor's rooms at the Albany, trading fashionable talk for what he calls useless information. Fermor remembers Lady Margaret Devereux, Lord Kelso's daughter: extraordinarily beautiful, she ran off with a penniless subaltern, then saw him killed in a duel at Spa a few months after the marriage. An ugly story said Kelso paid a Belgian adventurer to insult the husband in public. Kelso brought his daughter home. She never spoke to him again, died within a year, and left a son Fermor had forgotten. The old man hopes the boy will fall into proper hands. There should be money if Kelso did right by him, and the Selby property had already come to the mother through a grandfather who hated Kelso and thought him mean. Henry hears the tragedy as atmosphere, not as a warning. When Fermor grumbles that Lord Dartmoor wants to marry an American, Henry calls it the fashion and says the betting is on the Americans. He leaves meaning to dominate Dorian the way Dorian already dominates Basil's imagination.

At Lady Agatha's luncheon the same voice performs for a duchess, a politician, and a silent scholar. Lady Agatha wants Dorian for East End work. Henry says he wants the boy to play for him alone. He calls sympathy with suffering ugly, and answers reform by saying it is the problem of slavery, solved by amusing the slaves. The Duchess of Harley admits she has felt guilty for ignoring the East End, and that Henry's joke lets her face Lady Agatha without a blush. He tells her a blush is becoming only while one is young. When she asks how to become young again, he says she must repeat her follies. Sir Thomas calls the theory dangerous. The table laughs. Dorian, flushed at the end of the table, does not take his eyes off Henry.

After lunch Mr. Erskine of Treadley tells Henry he considers him extremely dangerous, then invites that philosophy of pleasure down to Burgundy at Treadley. Henry is already leaving for the park. Dorian touches his arm, drops a promised visit to Basil, and asks to come if Henry will keep talking. Henry says he has talked enough. All he wants now is to look at life, and Dorian may look at it with him.