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“I know perfectly of course that I brought it upon myself; but that doesn’t make it any better.��

Written in 1896 with the title “The Way It Came��, this tale of the supernatural is one that has probably been told and retold over the years in a more straightforward and less circuitous fashion. James is a wordy fellow whose style has never appealed to me, but the story itself is entertaining.

Our narrator describes a girl who had an extraordinary experience.

��.. She was charming, clever, pretty, unhappy; but it was none the less the thing to which she had originally owed her reputation.

Being at the age of eighteen somewhere abroad with an aunt she had had a vision of one of her parents at the moment of death. The parent was in England, hundreds of miles away and so far as she knew neither dying nor dead.��

This vision is the story she dined out on, so to speak. She becomes known as someone who saw a ghost.

Our narrator then tells us about her own young man who had seen his mother’s ghost. He is likewise known for this unusual experience and our narrator suggests the two should meet. Years go by with every opportunity missed, for a variety of reasons. She and her young man marry and it becomes a kind of running joke that he and her friend are destined not to meet.

When it ceases to be a joke, and he has become more and more curious about this girl, our narrator says she has only herself to blame.

I will leave the outcome for you to enjoy (or not). It is readily available online. You will have to wade through the convoluted verbiage and tortured sentence structure for which I believe James is known.

Rod Serling would have made a better show of it on the old Twilight Zone, I’m sure. Or perhaps he did?!




This is another from the Short Story Club Group, whose conversations I am happy to recommend. Leonard always gives us access to the story online or as a PDF if we don’t have the anthology of stories ourselves.

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