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It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian

Gray to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life;

and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and

delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so

essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of

thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon

himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were,

caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity,

leave them with that curious indifference that is not

incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that, indeed,

according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition

of it.