‘Two months ago I went to a crush 6 at Lady Brandon’s. ‘The story is simply this,’ said the painter after some time. Don’t flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him.’
He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Why, my dear Basil, he is Narcissus, 5 and you – well, or course you have an intellectual expression, and all that.
‘Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn’t know you were so vain and I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, 4 who looks as if he were made out of ivory and rose-leaves. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon 1 note of a distant organ. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.
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