Wax Simile
"The skin was finely wrinkles everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax."
The simile of wax is used often by the author to describe the appearance of the skin of an elderly person. Wax has a thin crust with tiny hairline wrinkles on it, and these wrinkles are reminiscent of the skin; the author also compares the color of the skin with candle wax later in the novel.
Greek Chorus Simile
Mrs Jesse tells that she has felt "like a kind of tragic chorus" before; This is because she does not only stand by whilst someone else is grieving, but she feels their grief deeply as well, as if it was her own. She also feels that she is present through a lot of tragic events.
Whirlpool Simile
"He was inside the atmosphere....as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool."
William feels that he is caught up in a natural force that he is powerless to fight against when he is in the company of Eugenia, and that he is somehow rendered incapable of escape. Her presence seems more than human, and his feelings are more force of nature than intellectual in type. He can no more fight against the pull he feels towards her than he could against the pull of a whirlpool.
Bee Simile
"....he was as a bee is caught in the lasso of perfume from the throat of a flower."
The magnetism that seems to draw a bee to a flower is the same magnetism that is felt by William when he is in the heady presence of Eugenia. Again he is emphasizing that his attraction to her is force of nature rather than intellectual or even sexual attraction, but he is not able to fight against it, because it is just something that is, rather than something that can be explained.
Ghost Metaphor
Emily Jesse believes that you are accompanied through life by your own accusing ghost, which is a metaphor for her own conscience. She is haunted by her conscience in the same way that a spirit will return again and again to accuse and berate the living; her conscience is the ghost that comes to accuse her of wrongs, and to haunt her with "what ifs" and thoughts of things that she should have done but never did, or things that she did, but should never have done.
