Both of these stories have something interesting in common. The unmarried confirmed bachelor male lead character in each story has a very close woman friend with whom he has had a very long purely Platonic relationship. "In the Beast in the Jungle" the male character explicitly states that one of the reasons he values his close relationship to his female friend is that she makes him appear to be more like other men. "In the Jolly Corner" the male leads faces a ghost like figure which seems to represent what his life would have been like had he been more like other men. In his introduction to the volume in which I read these two stories David Sweet of the American University in Cairo says that some do take this as a reference to the male lead characters inability to accept his homosexuality. I can see how one might reverse engineer the facts of the life of Henry James into such a reading but I think it is a reach in terms of the text but it is there as a possibility.