Many things were improbable, he reflected. That room last night, with its flowers and tall candles.
“This isn’t my place, you know,” she had said. “Shall I tell you the story? It belongs to a school-teacher, a queer little old-maidish person one would have thought if one had seen her in her schoolroom, no doubt. She invested all her savings in oil stock; and contrary to what you might expect, she made a fortune,—oh, just a little fortune, but enough to last her for the rest of her life. And she bought this house in Greenwich Village, and fitted up this room as a place for romantic things to happen in. But nothing romantic happened. So yesterday, when we met—she was going away on a visit, and I was in town for a day and a night, on my way somewhere else—well, we became very quickly acquainted, and she wanted me to stay here. I was thinking of her when you walked into her garden to-night. Shall I tell you? I think that she believed I was the sort of person to whom romantic things do happen, and that if I were here this room of hers would fulfil its destiny. Is it shameless of me to tell you that?”
“It’s beautiful of you to tell me that,” and he took her in his arms, no longer wondering how this adventure would end.
“I don’t like her.” It was his wife, speaking of the heroine of the story she was reading.
“Why not?”
“She isn’t real.”
He looked at his wife. She was real. And that was better than being the phantom creature of a lovely moment. Why should she begrudge the other kind of girl her moment?
It was odd; he wasn’t in the least ashamed. Men, he remembered, sometimes had bad consciences over things like this, they were driven to confession by remorse. But he had nothing to be sorry for. Why should he confess?
His wife laid the magazine aside a little petulantly.
“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s just a story.”