What a conjuring trick! Henry James, the third-generation scion of American plutocracy, cushioned comfortably all his life by a family trust-fund, socialising with the aristocratic elite of two continents, has a look at the life of a working-class telegraphist. The surprise is he shows exactly what such mechanically repetitive and financially marginal jobs are like.

Putting my Marxian hat on, the story dramatises the glamour of hegemonic ideology. Our heroine is ‘in the cage’ indeed. In supremely clever narrative sleight-of-hand, what the reader imagines the story will be - a certain kind of cross-class bad romance - turns out to be almost completely irrelevant. The real story turns out to be about the heroine and her woman friend. Romance doesn’t come into it. There is a ‘happier’ ending for one of them, but Henry is too realistic to suggest either has escaped the cage.