secret
From LAWLER 233: Stoddart cancelled the following lines in the typescript: "There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion."
From "Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Annotated & Uncensored": This sentiment belongs to an established literary convention: the artistic process is being equated with sexual intimacy. Normally, however, the artist is male and his subject (or model) female. Wilde is adding an unmistakably homoerotic twist to this tradition.