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She lingered for a few moments, and was garrulous over some

detail of the household. He sighed and told her to manage things

as she thought best. She left the room, wreathed in smiles.

As the door closed, Dorian put the key in his pocket and looked

round the room. His eye fell on a large, purple satin coverlet

heavily embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late

seventeenth-century Venetian work that his grandfather had found

in a convent near Bologna. Yes, that would serve to wrap the

dreadful thing in. It had perhaps served often as a pall for the

dead. Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its

own, worse than the corruption of death itself-something that

would breed horrors and yet would never die. What the worm was to

the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.

They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. They would

defile it and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still

live on. It would be always alive.