Soon she has glimpses about the grounds of a repellently attractive man and an equally sinister woman, who prove to be apparitions visible only to herself. From a reluctant housekeeper she extracts that the man, a former groom now dead, had “had his way” with any woman in the household or neighborhood that he chose, and that the female spectre, in life her predecessor as governess, had departed pregnant by him and died in London of an abortion. These indelicate facts James characteristically conveys by indirection, never by the bald word. Both these personalities had been evilly intimate with the children. Discovering that her awareness and antagonism can hold the spectres at bay, the governess devotes herself to protecting the children from them. She soon learns to her horror, however, that the little girl not only sees the dark woman but exerts self-control and histrionic talents beyond the capacity of most adults in order to conceal the fact. The boy becomes genuinely devoted to the governess and tries to cooperate in resisting the male ghost, but, always fragile, he succumbs to the emotional conflict and dies of a heart attack. The little girl, more completely dominated—might an affectionate man have weakened the spell for her as a woman did for the boy?—realizes now that only she and the governess can see the apparitions. With precocious acumen she accuses the governess of insanity, sensing that a child’s word will stand against that of a potentially hysterical spinster, and achieves her enemy’s removal. This is the first literary appearance of lesbian corruption of a child by an adult, and is probably attributable to the increasing publication of clinical case studies, for the theme has recurred at least twice in the subsequent half-century. James’s aversion can be explained on a number of counts. Where in _The Bostonians_ he studied well-bred women, his antagonists here are debauched members of a lower class. Then, too, it is known that he had abandoned an original plan of taking up permanent residence in Paris because he found the atmosphere there morally uncongenial, and he had settled in England, which had been rocked only three years earlier by the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde for homosexuality. It is conceivable that a desire to deny unequivocally any sympathy with that phenomenon helped to motivate _The Turn of the Screw_.