In Chapter XXIII of The Awakening, four people sit around a dinner table and tell stories.

The husband tells charming plantation memories — hunting possum, thrashing pecan trees, roaming fields in mischievous idleness. True. Decorative. Empty.

The father-in-law, a Confederate colonel, tells somber war episodes “in which he had acted a conspicuous part and always formed a central figure.” True. Performative. Dead.

The family doctor tells “the old, ever new and curious story of the waning of a woman’s love, seeking strange, new channels, only to return to its legitimate source.” True. Clinical. Aimed.

Then Edna tells hers. A woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back. Lost amid the Baratarian Islands. No one ever heard of them or found trace of them from that day to this.

It’s a pure invention. She says Madame Antoine told it to her. That’s also an invention. Chopin adds: “Perhaps it was a dream she had had.”

But: “every glowing word seemed real to those who listened. They could feel the hot breath of the Southern night; they could hear the long sweep of the pirogue through the glistening moonlit water, the beating of birds’ wings, rising startled from among the reeds in the salt-water pools; they could see the faces of the lovers, pale, close together, rapt in oblivious forgetfulness, drifting into the unknown.”

Three true stories made nobody feel anything. One invented story made everyone feel everything. The lie was the only thing at that table that made contact.

After dinner, the doctor walks home alone in the dark. He is old and growing tired. He did not want the secrets of other lives thrust upon him. But he heard what she was actually saying.

“I hope it isn’t Arobin,” he muttered to himself as he walked.

He decoded the fiction. He heard the shape beneath the story. And he could do nothing with what he heard.