Mrs. Harter

I know that Mary Ambrey remembers, just as I do. Sometimes we talk about it to each other, and exchange impressions and conjectures. Conjectures more than anything, because neither of us has the inside knowledge that alone could help one to a real understanding of what happened. Mary goes by intuition a good deal, and after all she did see something of Mrs. Harter. Personally, I know less than anybody. Bill Patch was my junior by many years and, though I saw him very often, we were never anything more than acquaintances. And Diamond Harter, oddly enough, I scarcely spoke to at all. And yet I have so vivid an impression of her strange personality that I feel as though I understood her better than anyone now living can ever do.

It is partly to rid myself of the obsession that she is to me that I have set myself to reconstruct the affair of last summer. It is said that antiquarians can reconstruct an entire monster from a single bone. Perhaps, as an amateur psychologist, I can reconstruct a singularly enigmatic personality from—well, more than a single fact, perhaps, but not much more. Impressions, especially other people’s impressions, are not facts. Besides, the most curious thing of all, to my mind, is that they all saw her quite differently. The aspect that she wore to Mary Ambrey, for instance, was not that in which Claire, my wife, saw her.

And yet Claire—about whom I intend to write with perfect frankness—is not devoid of insight, although she exaggerates everything.

Claire lives upon the edge of a volcano.

This is her own metaphor, and certainly represents quite accurately the state of emotional jeopardy in which her days are passed—indeed, it would be truer still to say that she lives upon the edge of a hundred volcanoes, so that there can never be a complete absence of eruptions.