"Yes, she is about the best-looking woman I know."
"And as unaffected as she is beautiful. That is her principal charm. So thoroughly bred, too, in every thought and action. I never met so lovable a creature!"
"What a pity she can't hear you!" says Branscombe. "Though perhaps it is as well she can't. Adulation has a bad effect on some people."
"She is too earnest, too thorough, to be upset by flattery. I sometimes wonder if there are any like her in the world."
"Very few, I think," says Dorian, genially.
Another pause, somewhat longer than the last, and then Sartoris says, with some hesitation, "Do you never think of marrying, Dorian?"
"Often," says Branscombe, with an amused smile.
"Yet how seldom you touch on the matter! Why, when I was your age, I had seen at least twenty women I should have married, had they shown an answering regard for me."
"What a blessing they didn't!" says Branscombe. "Fancy, twenty of them! You'd have found it awkward in the long run, wouldn't you? And I don't think they'd have liked it, you know, in this illiberal country. So glad you thought better of it."
"I wish I could once see you as honestly"—with a slight, almost unconscious, stress on the word—"in love as I have been scores of times."