Quotation from: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Written by: Oscar Wilde


He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget.
He read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little
cafe at Smyrna where the Hadjis sit counting their amber
beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled
pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of the Obelisk
in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite
in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot,
lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises,
and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with
small beryl eyes that crawl over the green steaming mud;
he began to brood over those verses which, drawing music
from kiss-stained marble, tell of that curious statue that
Gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "monstre charmant"
that couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre. But after a time
the book fell from his hand. He grew nervous, and a horrible
fit of terror came over him. What if Alan Campbell should be
out of England? Days would elapse before he could come back.
Perhaps he might refuse to come. What could he do then?
Every moment was of vital importance.

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