Across from where he stood was a high board fence, and in it a gate, painted ivory-white. He had an impulse to go over and open it. But instead he stood still, mockingly analysing that impulse. “In a story,” he said to himself, “there would be an adventure waiting in the next garden. But in real life, as I well know, there is only another garden, like this, with no one there. People do not moon about in gardens.”
But then he reflected, “I am mooning about in a garden.” Realizing that bankers do not do such things, it seemed to him that he was not a banker, but, as his friend had said, a phantom in a phantom world where impossible things come true.
He surrendered himself for a moment to this feeling, and began to think foolish thoughts, such as he had not thought for twelve years.
“What if there should be an adventure waiting for me on the other side of that gate? What if there were a girl in that garden, waiting?” These thoughts were frightening, and nevertheless they made him happy.
Then his common sense reasserted itself. There was nothing in that other garden, and he was being a damn fool. He reflected gratefully that no one would ever know what a damn fool he was. The depositors at the bank could never guess, nor could his wife. And since there was nothing on the other side of the gate, he might as well go and open it and look into the garden, and then go back to bed.
He walked over to the gate, and there he paused. Why trouble himself to prove what he already knew? Why not keep intact the memory of this absurd fancy and have the pleasure of thinking that perhaps, after all, there had been an adventure waiting beyond that gate?
He realized that if he opened the gate and nothing happened, it would hurt. He put his hand on the latch in a mood curiously like the mood of prayer. If he had had a God to whom such a prayer could be addressed, he might have prayed, that just this once—— But his was no pagan deity, and so he did not pray. Lacking the courage that prayer sometimes gives, he took his hand from the latch.
Then he remembered how he had gone down to the waterfront every morning and looked out over the bay and never set sail for the islands of romance; and he felt that this was a test. It didn’t make any difference what happened: he couldn’t turn back.
He pushed open the gate softly.
Seated on a little wooden bench was a girl; her face was turned away from him, but he could see the languid sweep of a slender arm, bare and beautiful.