 He adds that she had "poisoned herself—in time", making the analogy of a child finding the key to a locked medicine cabinet.The story was written in the late 1890s as part of Machen's struggle to find a direction for a projected novel, other outgrowths of which were published as the novella "A Fragment of Life" (collected in "The House of Souls") and as the collection of prose poems "Ornaments in Jade" (1924).Machen had read widely in mystical literature and folklore ever since an early employer had set him to work cataloguing occult books, and his learning gave his tale a depth and verisimilitude unusual in such works.