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CHAPTER XI . For years , Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book . Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it . He procured from Paris no less than nine large - paper copies of the first edition , and had them bound in different colours , so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed , at times , to have almost entirely lost control . The hero , the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended , became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself . And , indeed , the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life , written before he had lived it . In one point he was more fortunate than the novel’s fantastic hero . He never knew — never , indeed , had any cause to know — that somewhat grotesque dread of mirrors , and polished metal surfaces , and still water which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life , and was occasioned by the sudden decay of a beau that had once , apparently , been so remarkable . It was with an almost cruel joy — and perhaps in nearly every joy , as certainly in every pleasure , cruelty has its place — that he used to read the latter part of the book , with its really tragic , if somewhat overemphasized , account of the sorrow and despair of one who had himself lost what in others , and the world , he had most dearly valued . For the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward , and many others besides him , seemed never to leave him . Even those who had heard the most evil things against him — and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs — could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him . He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world . Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered the room . There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them . His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished . They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensual . Often , on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were his friends , or thought that they were so , he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room , open the door with the key that never left him now , and stand , with a mirror , in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him , looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas , and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass . The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure .
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