The narrator, a critic, is told by a well-known novelist he’s reviewed that he and all the other critics have missed the point of the author’s works, the meaning underlying all of them—“The Figure in the Carpet.” A friend claims he’s found the author’s secret, but reveals it only to his wife, who won’t tell the narrator after a freak accident kills her husband on their honeymoon. She eventually remarries, but after her death the narrator discovers she did not share the secret with her second husband. James may be playing with the intentional fallacy; if your readers don’t get it, there’s nothing there. It’s been suggested that James’s homosexuality, probably unconsummated, is the key to his works.
Another somewhat obtuse narrator in “Glasses” is an artist who paints an impecunious beauty who has a sight problem she conceals to get a titled husband and out of vanity. A man who would happily marry her even with disfiguring glasses—this is the narrator’s judgment—eventually does marry her when she goes blind, and he helps her conceal her blindness to humor her vanity.
Another critic, who hints that his approbation is enough to get an author a reputation while condemning him to no sales, watches while a writer he thinks supremely talented tries unsuccessfully to write marketable stuff: “you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse” is the narrator’s judgment in “The Next Time.”
“The Way It Came” is one of James’s ghost stories about a man who saw his mother the day she died far away and a woman who saw her father in the same way. The narrator tries to get her friend—the woman—and her eventual fiancé—the man—together to meet, but then she balks when the meeting becomes possible. The clairvoyant woman dies and the fiancé says she showed up at his place that night. The narrator does not believe, as he does, that she was there in the flesh, but she is still jealous and breaks off the engagement. ( )