"The Demon Lover,"" by Elizabeth Bowen, is a story about Kathleen Drover and a promise that she makes twenty-five years before. Kathleen goes to her old house in order to collect a few belongings, and she finds a letter inside the house with her name on it. It discusses an arranged meeting between herself and someone whom she shares an "anniversary- with. She begins to think, all the while becoming more and more cautious and afraid. She becomes frantic, and plans to leave the house and find a taxi so that she can return to the house and take the driver inside with her, so that she can collect the items that she needs. When she finds a taxi, she sits in the back seat, only to discover that the driver of the car is the man she is trying to escape from. He drives off "into the hinterland of deserted streets."" The central idea is that when people make promises, escaping from those promises is not always possible.
Kathleen is obviously a nave girl when she is younger. She meets a man who pays attention to her, and she becomes fixated with him. He makes her promise to wait for him, and he has her make a blood promise by cutting the palm of her hand with one of his military buttons. After this encounter, she tries to forget about her promise, and she tries to escape her fate. She even represses the memory of what he looks like, and the details of her promise. A dynamic character, she is strong and brave when she enters the old house, but by the end, her fear gets the best of her and she panics. By becoming panicked, she plays right into his hands.
The conflict in the story is between honoring commitments and breaking them in an effort to change the past, and it is an internal conflict. The man in this story symbolizes the devil, and Kathleen makes an agreement with him in blood that she will wait for him, and be with him in twenty-five years. In the meantime, she gets married and has children because she believes her fiancée to be dead.