“Oh, you mean Mrs. Symmington?”

“Didn’t you?”

Mrs. Dane Calthrop shook her head.

“Of course one is sorry for her, but it would have been bound to happen anyway, wouldn’t it?”

“Would it?” said Joanna dryly.

Mrs. Dane Calthrop turned to her.

“Oh, I think so, dear. If suicide is your idea of escape from trouble then it doesn’t very much matter what the trouble is. Whenever some very unpleasant shock had to be faced, she’d have done the same thing. What it really comes down to is that she was that kind of woman. Not that one would have guessed it. She always seemed to me a selfish rather stupid woman, with a good firm hold on life. Not the kind to panic, you would think—but I’m beginning to realize how little I really know anyone.”

“I’m still curious as to whom you meant when you said ‘Poor thing,’” I remarked.

She stared at me.

“The woman who wrote the letters, of course.”

“I don’t think,” I said dryly, “I shall waste sympathy on her.”

Mrs. Dane Calthrop leaned forward. She laid a hand on my knee.

“But don’t you realize—can’t you feel? Use your imagination. Think how desperately, violently unhappy anyone must be to sit down and write these things. How lonely, how cut off from human kind. Poisoned through and through, with a dark stream of poison that finds its outlet in this way. That’s why I feel so self-reproachful. Somebody in this town has been racked with that terrible unhappiness, and I’ve had no idea of it. I should have had. You can’t interfere with actions— I never do. But that black inward unhappiness—like a septic arm physically, all black and swollen. If you could cut it and let the poison out it would flow away harmlessly. Yes, poor soul, poor soul.”

She got up to go.

I did not feel like agreeing with her. I had no sympathy for our anonymous letter writer whatsoever. But I did ask curiously:

“Have you any idea at all, Mrs. Calthrop, who this woman is?”

She turned her fine perplexed eyes on me.

“Well, I can guess,” she said. “But then I might be wrong, mightn’t I?”

She went swiftly out through the door, popping her head back to ask:

“Do tell me, why have you never married, Mr. Burton?”

In anyone else it would have been an impertinence, but with Mrs. Dane Calthrop you felt that the idea had suddenly come into her head and she had really wanted to know.

“Shall we say,” I said, rallying, “that I have never met the right woman?”

“We can say so,” said Mrs. Dane Calthrop, “but it wouldn’t be a very good answer, because so many men have obviously married the wrong woman.”

This time she really departed.

Joanna said:

“You know I really do think she’s mad. But I like her. The people in the village here are afraid of her.”

“So am I, a little.”

“Because you never know what’s coming next?”