Dorian is in shock but asks to hear the whole story. Lord Henry reports that the death was clearly not an accident. About half-past midnight, Sibyl and her mother were leaving the theatre. Sibyl excused herself, saying she had left something upstairs. When she did not return, the people at the theatre checked and found her on the floor of her dressing room, dead from ingesting poison.
Lord Henry is concerned with keeping Dorian out of the scandal. He asks Dorian to spend the evening with him at the opera so that the unpleasantness of the suicide does not get on Dorian's nerves.
Lord Henry need not be concerned for Dorian's nerves. Dorian admits that he murdered Sibyl, "murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat," but he continues to say, in a detached manner, that the whole affair seems too "wonderful for tears." Instead of feeling remorse over Sibyl's death, Dorian muses that his first love letter was written to a dead girl. Within only a few seconds, he concludes that Sibyl's suicide was very selfish of her; it leaves him without the guidance that marriage to her might have provided.
Lord Henry offers several glib comments on marriage and specifically on what a disaster this marriage would have been. Dorian wonders why he "cannot feel this tragedy" as much as he thinks he should and wonders if he is heartless. The death of Sibyl seems like "a wonderful ending to a wonderful play" to Dorian. Lord Henry, "who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism," is pleased to extend the simile. He assures Dorian that he is not heartless; the experience has been like a brilliant play, and Dorian should regard the whole matter as if he were a spectator at the theater.
