The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings
Chapter One
THE STUDIO was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the
light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came
through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the most
delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags 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 flamelike 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. The
sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long
unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty
gi ... read full excerpt from: The Picture of Dorian Gray ebook
