ABSTRACT
Mary Dempster, the young wife of one of the local pastors in the imaginary small town of Deptford, entered Ramsay's life when he was still a preteen boy, on a snowy day in 1908. When Mary Dempster slid into dependency, slow-wittedness and even psychosis, she never exploited religious imagery or language, and never involved religion as either the cause or the crutches of her plight. The gravel pit event turned the benign, silly Mrs. Dempster into a dangerous lunatic. Broadly speaking, degrees of personality distortions are to be found within the whole population, but that was not the core of Mrs. Dempster's mental illness. The set of criteria of spiritual maturity that are less about intuitive qualities and more about the intellect, such as an all-encompassing philosophy of life, the ability of four-tiered interpretation or of a shift of perspectives, are quite hazy where Mrs. Dempster is concerned.
