The Picture of Dorian Gray

A month later, Dorian and Lord Henry have formed a steady friendship. One day, when Dorian is over at Lord Henry’s house in Mayfair, Lord Henry is late, and his wife engages Dorian in conversation. Dorian sees Lady Henry as an awkward and slightly unpleasant person.

Later, Lord Henry tells Dorian never to marry. Dorian admits that he has fallen in love with an actress named Sybil Vane: “a girl hardly seventeen years of age with a little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that [are] violet wells of passion, [and] lips...like the petals of a rose” (50). Though he also claims that she is a genius, Lord Henry says that women cannot be geniuses because they’re the “decorative sex.”

Lord Henry watches the young man expound about his passion for Sybil (whom Dorian fell in love with when she performed in Romeo and Juliet) with a subdued pleasure. He feels no jealousy—in fact, he believes that this new dalliance makes Dorian even more interesting. Dorian wants to bring Basil and Lord Henry to see Sybil perform, and has plans to remove her from the patronage of a crude Jewish man, to whom she is technically bound for another three years.