In a grimly ironic note to conclude the story, the narrator says Ambient later revealed that his wife had become partially reconciled to his novels and even read Beltraffio in the weeks before her death.
The double dose of mortality at the end of the story may seem extreme, but James narrates events so smoothly—even with touches of humor, especially about Ambient's bizarre, arty sister—that readers may accept the catastrophe as perhaps not inevitable but somewhat believable.
In the Notebooks James said he based the story on the real-life marriage of John Addington Symonds, an English art historian, poet, and proponent of homosexuality who was constantly quarreling with his very proper wife.
The contrast of an esthetic point of view, carried "even to morbidness" (to use James's own words), with a more rigid, traditionalist stance creates the story's intense atmosphere of conflict.
The crux for the reader is whether Ambient's wife is really capable of showing such disregard for her son's suffering, in a wildly misguided belief that the boy is better off dead than corrupted by his father's influence.