“Oh no, I didn’t. She found me there. I can’t exactly explain what made me do it, Miles. I think--stupidly enough--it was the thought of her packing. I couldn’t get it out of my head that after the whole appalling business was over she’d have to come and see all the clothes she’d been wearing, and the little, inanimate things, and the sitting room with the bow window, where she’d waited for Bill. And I thought that it would be less frightful if she found someone there and the packing done--and even if it made her very angry, it would be better than seeing it all again just exactly as it had been before. But she wasn’t angry. She came much sooner than I’d expected and walked straight into the sitting room, and I don’t think she remembered who I was or anything. She sat down by the table, I remember, and folded her hands in her lap and never said a word. And I finished the packing.” “Without speaking?” Mary nodded. “I was crying, Miles. I didn’t know that one _could_ cry like that any more--at my age. But if you’d seen her face--” She broke off, and then after a minute or two spoke again. “If the people, like Lady Annabel or General Kendal, who talked about her having done so much harm, and wrecked Bill’s life, and so on, could have seen her then, surely they’d have realized that she was paying for everything--over and over again. There’s nothing anyone can say of her that she can’t have said to herself--you see, she’s intelligent, isn’t she? She knew what she’d done far better than any of them could ever tell her. That’s the point of the whole thing, really, isn’t it? Mrs. Harter was capable of things, good as well as bad, that the rest of us didn’t even begin to apprehend. If the Kendals--I’m using them as a symbol, you understand--if the Kendals think that she was ‘unhappy’ and it served her right, it’s only because they attach such a trivial meaning to the word. I saw her once when she was happy, out with him one morning, long before we really knew anything about her and Bill--and I can’t forget it. Her emotions were in a different plane from those of the rest of us. Her capacity for feeling was different--I suppose it was really that which we all felt about her in the very beginning, when we discussed her. Life must always have been much more difficult for her than for most people--and yet all the time, one knows, it might have been so much more beautiful.” “Do you really believe that?” I was remembering Mrs. Harter’s sullen, contemptuous expression, her ungracious manner, even that characteristic middle-class phraseology, those intonations and inflexions that placed her, so unmistakably, in the aristocratic judgments of Cross Loman-- After all, I had never seen her, as Mary had, illuminated. “Do you really think that Mrs. Harter’s life might have been something--beautiful?” “Might have been?” said Mary. “It ought to have been. Sometimes I’m not even sure, Miles, that it won’t yet be, in spite of everything. She’s got it in her.”