“Even before Amy came in”

Henry James, “The Third Person” (1900).

Elaine and I have been reading a volume of Henry James’s ghost stories with diminishing patience. The Turn of the Screw — great. But the other stories are a mixed bag, and Jamesian syntax doesn’t help. I lost my mind a little with the sentence above and made a motion, with two stories left, to move on. Elaine seconded. The motion carried. So even before Amy came in, we were out. And we turned this afternoon to Tempest-Tost, the first volume of Robertson Davies’s Salterton Trilogy.

[The volume in question: “The Turn of the Screw” and Other Ghost Stories, ed. Susie Boyt (New York: Penguin, 2017).]