Mary says that she never will.
No one has heard from her, no one knows whether she is alive or dead. The charitable Lady Annabel once murmured a suggestion to the effect that “that infamous woman” would, no doubt, have changed her name, discarding the one which she had covered “with enduring shame.”
I disagree with Lady Annabel first and last. I cannot imagine Mrs. Harter changing her name, even though it belongs to her husband, and I do not consider that she has “covered it with enduring shame.” These phrases....
The personality of Diamond Harter outweighs them all and leaves one confronted only with a sense of stark tragedy.
And that, to my mind, remains the last word in the case. Tragedy, one of the rarest things in the world, came into our midst, and came through the only two people capable of tragedy. Most of us, as a matter of fact, did not even recognize it. The Leeds couple saw a scandal agreeably shocking and terrible, the Kendals saw folly, and impropriety, and the sad, sad death of one of the few young men of their acquaintance, Lady Annabel saw outraged laws and well-merited retribution, Sallie and Martyn Ambrey saw themselves seeing a very interesting psychological study—and so on.
The affair of Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter was all of those things, was fitted by all those labels. But they miss the essence of it, as labels always do.
I am constantly reminded, odiously, and against every æsthetic canon, of a homely French saying: A bon chat, bon rat.
I know of no dignified equivalent that can convey that implication.
We translate life in terms of our own inner values ... and Bill and Mrs. Harter were capable of tragedy, and it came to them, and most of us condemned them, and some of us only pitied.
It is over, and yet it will never be over. It continues to live, in the personality of Diamond Harter, and, indeed, in the personalities of us all.