Mrs. Bathurst“ may not be the most puzzling of Rudyard Kipling's ‘obscure’ stories, but it has surely become the one most puzzled over by admirers and critics alike. A number of articles have been printed about it in the pages of the Kipling Journal, and many of the important Kipling critics have alluded, a bit tentatively perhaps, to this fine story—Edmund Wilson calls it a ”remarkable story“ and then hurries on—but so far no one has ever really accounted for what happens in ”Mrs. Bathurst“ or has suggested fully what the story is about. There has been much interest in characters and incidents, of course, but almost no consideration of theme. A good deal has been made of Kipling's fondness for cryptic utterance, the implication being that ”Mrs. Bathurst“ is an elaborate puzzle game in which the reader must try to determine, from artfully concealed clues, what the characters in the story are really up to. Other commentators have dealt with Kipling's method of composition, his habit of repeatedly and drastically cutting his manuscripts in general, and the manuscript of this story in particular. C.S. Lewis, among others, has suggested that the momentum of cutting ”Mrs. Bathhurst“ may have carried Kipling, all unaware, past the point of intelligibility and that the obscurity of the story may therefore be accidental. What no critic has reasoned, however, is that Kipling's struggle for compression and his pruning away of representational elements in ”Mrs. Bathurst,“ to permit concentration on other values, justifies the closest possible reading of the text and makes the critic responsible not only for clarifying the surface action of the story but also for discovering the significance of that action. Such a detailed study of ”Mrs. Bathurst“ reveals a powerful tale embodying one of Kipling's profoundest visions of life and composed in a style far enough ahead of its time to account for the story's reputation as a perennial puzzler.