As it was, she’d been a month in a London nursing home before she came to Cross Loman. It was in the nursing home, I imagine, that Diamond Harter took stock of life. She’d been in that home for weeks and not a soul had been to see her. There was no one to come. Her father had retired from business and lived by himself at Torquay. They hadn’t even corresponded for years. I have heard Mrs. Harter’s speaking voice--a voice stronger and more abrupt than that of most women--and her tones ring in my ears now, sometimes, so that I think I can distinguish the very words that she may have used on the day that she and Bill Patch went up Loman Hill together. But there must have been an intonation in her voice then that neither I, nor anyone else, ever heard there. She told him that she’d never been in love. Men had stirred her senses, and one or two of them had excited her half-resentful admiration. She had a most acute power of distinguishing _nuances_ of breeding, and in the East she came into contact with a class of man of very different caliber from that of Harter. Not once, in all her twenty-eight years, had she even wished to establish a permanent link between herself and a fellow creature. And Bill Patch, who liked everybody and who was everybody’s friend, listened to her. I suppose it was just that element in Bill Patch that made a writer of him, which enabled him to understand. Something rather beyond the apprehension of most of us, to whom he was simply a good-tempered, red-headed boy with an unexpected brain power. Only Sallie, justifying her determination to specialize in psychology, had seen rather further than other people when she said that Captain Patch was a temperamental romantic, capable of a _grande passion_. He listened to Diamond Harter and came, I suppose, as near to perfect comprehension of her as one soul can ever come to perfect comprehension of another. That is to say that he not only understood what her words told him, but that he saw far beyond them to the Diamond Harter that she might have been, and that--almost unknown to herself--she must, sometimes, have dimly felt a wish to be. Whatever else there is to say about Mrs. Harter, it is indisputable that she possessed a character of unusual strength and that there were in her latent possibilities almost frightful in their intensity. Bill Patch saw straight past everything, accepted everything, and somehow made her see that he understood and that he accepted. He was passionately in love with her--but that day on Loman Hill he did not speak a word of love to her. There were no preliminary explanations or tentative confidences between them. The whole thing was too vital for that.