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James's Story.

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In Henry James's version,
an unnamed narrator

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discovers she has two
good friends who've

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had the same experience,
a woman whose father came

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to her in a gallery in
Italy just as he was dying

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in New York and a man whose
mother showed up in his rooms

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in Cambridge after she died.

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Determined that her two
similarly gifted friends should

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meet, she makes numerous plans.

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But oddly, something always
comes to thwart them.

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Finally, after she's become
engaged to the male friend,

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our narrator decides
that she really

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must arrange this meeting.

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So she fixes up something so
simple that it cannot fail.

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However, at the last
minute, she finally gets it.

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These two are destined
to fall in love.

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There's really no
other possibility.

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And so she herself
and through subterfuge

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prevents this last attempt.

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Last, because by
sheer coincidence,

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her female friend
dies that night.

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In the morning, overcome
with guilt and remorse,

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the woman tells her
lover what she did,

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but he declares,
that's not possible.

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She came to my rooms
just before midnight.

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The woman insists
that it must have

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been her ghost, while the man
insists that she was alive.

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They finally agree to disagree
and get on with their lives,

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except that the woman
notices a change in him,

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and one week before
the wedding gently

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declares that she
knows that he's

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been keeping up a liaison
with her dead friend ever

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since that fatal night.

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And though he denies it, he
doesn't do so very vigorously

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and allows her to break
off their engagement.

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Needless to say,
neither ever marries.

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And as it is so
often with James,

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were never sure if
the ghost occurred

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or if the woman was
not simply eaten up

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by a jealousy
engendered by her guilt

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or much more likely by a
different jealousy, a jealousy

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for that other world which
her obsession with that detail

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of her friends' lives
tells us she preferred

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to her friends all along.

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James' version is unusual too
in that it's the only ghost

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story I know in which a ghost
is genetic, a kind of corner

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of the eye that just
can't stop in time

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and heard the other arrive,
though, way across town,

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or felt a line drawn, taut,
and could not respond.

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Although a light comes on
all on its own, every day,

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it just that time, time,
they said, is stone.

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I once had a heart
made of string

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and hung myself, my love.

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