They walked on rather aimlessly. He hoped she wouldn't notice he was touched, because he wouldn't have known how to explain why. Here lay the great discrepancy between aesthetic truth and sleazy reality.

Patrick White
About This Quote

In this short story by Francis Bacon, the narrator pretends he doesn't know that his wife has been unfaithful to him. He's a writer and a man of the world, but he realizes that, in matters of the heart, he is very naive. In other words, he knows how to make realist fiction look good – but when it comes to matters of the heart he has no idea what he's doing. He tells his wife that they are heading to some place where they will be alone together for the first time in years.

But she doesn't buy it. She knows him too well. She knows that her husband doesn't want to be alone with her so soon after she has betrayed him.

Source: The Vivisector

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