The many layers of secrets in a James short story: The Tree of Knowledge

The Tree of Knowledge is by no means Henry James's best, or best-known, story but it's a really good, almost-great story never the less and shows why for many readers, me included, James's late style with its convolutions and hesitations works best in shorter forms. This one is about a threesome - Mr. and Mrs. Mallow - he a sculptor working in marble and she his devoted wife, their son Launcelot (Lance - ironic that the novel I just put down had a same-name character known as Lotto) - and their friend, the lifelong bachelor outsider observer aesthete, Peter Brench. Now whom does he remind you of? Brench is a man of secrets, the biggest being his lifelong crush on Mrs. Mallow, the 2nd being his utter contempt for the banal and unskilled artworks that Mallow produces. He of course has never been able to tell his opinion to his friend or his spouse. He's Lance's godfather, and when Lance turns 20 and sets off for Paris to learn about art, Brench is deeply concerned that once he gets to Paris he will "know." There's much hemming and hawing and jawing about what he will "know" - but at the end of the story we learn (giving it away here, but you've probably guessed it) that Marrow's art is terrible (he is able to continue with essentially no patronage through his family fortune - or maybe it's hers), and then a deeper secret, that Frau Mallow has known all along that her husband's art is terrible. But as with James there are further, or rather deeper, layers to this secret: is the secret really that Brench loves Mrs. M? Modern readers will have to also suspect that there's a sexual secret - that Brench is homosexual, and maybe Lance's going to Paris will be an initiation into sexuality and he will surmise Brench's secret or realize the he himself is homosexual. This story is typically Jamesian in approaching all its major points by indirection - there are certain truths or beliefs that it seems James can only allude to and never state or stare at directly, homosexuality being one of them. Think, too, about the title - and the suggestion that understanding, whether of sexuality, love, or art, can leads to expulsion from the "garden," which may be a good or bad thing, depending on the flora.