The Picture of Dorian Gray

to be very proud—I certainly struggled to the door. There, of course, I
stumbled against Lady Brandon. ‘You are not going to run away so soon,
Mr. Hallward?’ she screamed out. You know her curiously shrill voice?”

“Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty,” said Lord Henry,
pulling the daisy to bits with his long nervous fingers.

“I could not get rid of her. She brought me up to royalties, and people
with stars and garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras and
parrot noses. She spoke of me as her dearest friend. I had only met her
once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me. I believe
some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at least had
been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the
nineteenth-century standard of immortality. Suddenly I found myself
face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely
stirred me. We were quite close, almost touching. Our eyes met again.
It was reckless of me, but I asked Lady Brandon to introduce me to him.
Perhaps it was not so reckless, after all. It was simply inevitable. We
would have spoken to each other without any introduction. I am sure of
that. Dorian told me so afterwards. He, too, felt that we were destined