The first four stories are often categorized as ghost stories.[1]
In "The Shadowy Third" the first-person narrator, Miss Randolph, is employed as Mrs. Maradick's nurse by her husband Doctor Maradick. Miss Randolph comes to see Mrs. Maradick as a victim and not as a patient suffering from hallucinations, as Doctor Maradick insists. The ghost of Mrs. Maradick's daughter, Dorothea, haunts the story and the reader is left to determine if Dorothea's well-placed jumping rope resulted in Doctor Maradick's accidental death.
"Dare's Gift" includes Meredith Beckwith's story and Lucy Dare's story and is told in two parts. Meredith Beckwith betrays her husband by giving information to an investigator and, thereby, crippling her husband's case. Lucy Dare chooses the Confederate cause over her fiance's life, revealing his hiding place. Both told by male narrators, the suggested relationship between the stories may be summarized by the statement that both protagonists make in the story: "I had to do it....I would do it again!"[2]
In "The Past" Mr. Vanderbridge's memories of his deceased first wife keep him from living in the present. His second wife attempts to break the past's hold over him (and her) by burning the letters that reveal his first wife's infidelity.
"Whispering Leaves" depicts Mammy Rhody as the faithful slave, capable of protecting and saving her young charge, Pell, from death in a fire, even after her own death. Scholar Richard Meeker suggests that Mammy Rhody was modeled after Glasgow's "mammy," who is discussed in her posthumously published memoir, The Woman Within (1954).[3]
Anthologized as a mystery story, "A Point in Morals" asks readers to unravel the identity of one or multiple murderers and to judge the psychologist's response to the passenger's narrative.[4]
"The Difference" illumines the limitations of wives in the early twentieth century when confronted with their husbands' infidelity.[5]
"Jordan's End" portrays the last moments of the progressive demise of the Jordan household. The physician-narrator leaves the reader to decide the source of Alan Jordan's death. Often connected to Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher,[6] some scholars group "Jordan's End" with the first four stories of the collection.
