And one evening he told her the story.
He began haltingly enough, constrained as he was to present to her imagination these two nameless figures of a man and a woman who had wished rashly for a happiness not to be had within the solid confines of reality; but as he talked, he forgot all else, and his confession became a passionate vindication of the rights of that phantom self for which the workaday world has so little use, and which can achieve only a pitiful and momentary freedom in what the world calls folly. Then, for he had come to the end of his tale, in that picture of a room with its faded flowers and spent candles and a face whose eyes were no longer bright with wild dreams, abruptly he ceased speaking. And it seemed to him that even without as yet naming himself, he had confessed his crime of secret rebellion against the wisdom of the world.
He looked up and saw that there were tears in his wife’s eyes.
“It’s true,” she said. “Women do feel like that.”
He was bewildered.
“All women,” she went on. “But I didn’t think men knew. How did you know?”
He was about to tell her how he knew, when she spoke again, softly.
“I’m glad she found so beautiful a lover.”
Then he was ashamed, of what, he hardly knew, unless it was of what he seemed to his wife. He realized that he was to her merely what he had laboured for twelve years to seem to all the world. Not the foolish adventurer of his tale; no, she could never believe that. He imagined how it would sound to her if he pretended to be that man in the story. It would be the strangest argument in the annals of marriage. He could prove nothing; his secret was fatally secure. She would say, “You have dreamed it, dear.”
And seeing himself with her eyes, he was shaken by a doubt. Perhaps it had been just a dream.