James's great "secret"?

Seems I keep coming back to Henry James, despite more than occasional frustrations with the incredibly tortuous sentence constructions in his late work, but picked up collection of novellas and began re-reading The Beast in the Jungle, perhaps last read when I was in college (how could I possibly have understood it at that time?) - it's a really late James work - 1903? - and in a way a summary of every tragic and sad element in his life - what James's life would have been like (and my in fact have felt like) had he not written many great novels and stories. Briefly, story is of two people, young man meets a young woman, recalls that they had met some ten years previously, and he had confessed to her his great "secret" - she's the only one he's ever told and she has told no one. His great secret is that he believes that somewhere, sometime in his life he will undergo an extraordinary and unique experience - though he has no idea of what nature. She raises idea that this as he describes may be falling in love - but he says, no, it's an experience unique to him. The two go through a whole lifetime as Platonic friends, waiting for this experience to emerge, like an unseen beast in a jungle, ready to strike. It will be obvious to all readers now, a century away from James, that in part the "secret" was his homosexual desires - and in part the tragedy of his life was that he could not express these desires, in life or in art; the tragedy in Beast is that the two of them pass through an entire lifetime waiting for something to happen rather than acting on their feelings and emotions - declaring love for each other, falling in love, or else perhaps moving on? The irony, perhaps, his that his sense of a unique fate awaiting him is not unique at all - everyone has felt these thoughts and fears, though not perhaps to the morbid degree that will ruin a life, two lives.