Chapter 2 focuses on the heroines of three James texts from the late 1890s, The Spoils of Poynton, In the Cage, and The Turn of the Screw. The lack of money and social standing of all three women exempt them from the realm in which promises are given and received, As a result, their duty is limited to ensuring that the people for whom they work recognize their own. This paradoxical notion of a promise given by proxy, as it were, accounts for the striking formal experiments performed by all three texts, the principal one being that all three heroines arrive too late for their own stories.