She did not speak, could not speak, so confounded was she by her own feelings, a mixture of relief and quick hurt. A moment passed and she perceived that the insistent foolish hurt prevailed. Yes, she was hurt, her vanity as a woman, she told herself harshly, and she maintained steadfast silence. Not for anything would she reveal this self to him.
“Instead,” he was saying, “I am conscious in your presence of a beautiful freedom to be myself, to think my own thoughts, plan my work, consider the future — in short, to live, and more freely even than when I am alone, because you broaden my freedom just by being the person you are, instead of making demands, limiting freedom as other women do. I’m hopelessly in love with you, I suppose, but not as I’ve been before. So I say that I don’t understand the nature of love. I only know that I love you — in a way that is entirely new to me. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone else.” He turned to her abruptly and putting his hands on her shoulders, he looked into her eyes. “What do you say to all this?”
She shook her head. What could she say? Something banal, perhaps. I’m old enough to be your mother, you know. No, she could not. Her own heart refused the words. She had no feeling of a mother toward him. She had no wish, no will, to play the mother to him and she would not use a lie to cover the truth, that she loved him passionately.
“Well?” he demanded.
“I don’t understand our relationship, either,” she said at last.
He turned his eyes from her then, but he did not move away from her. Instead he put his arm about her shoulders and they stood thus, side by side and facing the sea until she was able no longer to endure the pressure of his body against hers. She moved from him.
“Let’s get on our way, shall we?” she said.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Anywhere,” she said.
…“And so,” Jared was saying, “I want to devise an instrument that a cineplastic surgeon can use to create two fingers out of a forearm to substitute for the lost hand. I know how to do it, I think and, with training, the amputee will be able even to feel in those fingers. That’s always my purpose, to restore the sense of feeling. But it’s still the brain that interests me most. No one really understands the structure of the human brain. There the source of feeling is lodged — feeling and emotion and thought, of course. I’m studying the biology of the brain, dissecting a brain, actually, in my laboratory, so that I can devise certain instruments — ah, there’s so much to do!
“The ordinary stethoscope, for instance, needs radical improvement. I want to study it, too, in depth; in spite of its general use and acceptance, I’ve an idea it needs a thorough revaluation, though new models keep appearing. There’s been no basic acoustical study of it for years. There must be something wrong, or lacking, in it or there wouldn’t be such an evidence of need for improvement. There ought to be a total soundway, for example, from the patient’s chest to the listener’s ear, excluding thereby all environmental noises. The three different wave forms — but why do I bore you with all this? You see what I mean — when I am with you my mind runs on its own way, only with more than normal creative energy, as though your presence provides an environment of conducive waves. Why not? There’s physiological evidence of that sort of thing. We don’t half understand the electrical effect of one personality on another.”
She listened to this monologue and at the pause she replied with literal understanding. “Entirely possible, of course — and probable. And I love the way your mind ferrets here and there and everywhere, like an inquisitive animal quite apart from the rest of you. Sometime, of course, you’ll have to exert the disciplines of the artist as well as of the scientist, both of which you are, and then you’ll have to choose where to concentrate your direction. Oh, yes, you are an artist”—for he was shaking his head—“I’ve seen what you draw on bits of paper when you’re thinking out one of your inventions!”
It was quite true. In the room in the Vermont house she had found scraps of paper on the desk whereon he had drawn sketches of animals, of human faces — one of these her own — and of intricate geometric designs. In the guest room in the huge old Philadelphia house she had discovered other such drawings and had carefully preserved them all.
“Not that I belittle inventions,” she went on, “but inventions are never permanent. Someone else always thinks of an improvement and the invention on which a man has spent, perhaps, his life, is outdated. But art is eternal, ageless, complete in itself.”
He cried out his admiration. “God, how accurately you put it! Entirely true, of course, and I shan’t forget. But you know what you’ve done? Suddenly what I thought was to be my lifework, you’ve made into an avocation. I shall have to reconsider.”
His handsome face fell into grim lines, his mouth grew stern, he muttered to himself unintelligible sounds. She perceived that she was forgotten and was well content.
…That night, on the way home and stopping at the same inn, he took her in his arms before they parted, and holding her against him, he kissed her, drew back to gaze intensely into her eyes, then kissed her again and yet again before he let her go and turned toward his room. She closed the door between them, giving him a last smile as she did so, but he opened it again to thrust head and shoulders through the opening. “That smile—” he began abruptly and stopped. She was already standing before the mirror, taking the hairpins out of her hair and she looked over her shoulder at him.
“Did I smile?” she asked.
“You did — a damned Mona Lisa sort of smile it was, too,” he retorted, and closed the door without further comment.
She stood motionless before the mirror, and saw herself reflected there, not smiling at all but serious, her face flushing, her eyes too bright. A moment had arrived, a moment of decision. If she should open the door and simply enter his room without a word the moment would be hers, the wound would be healed, her own demand satisfied. For in truth how little he understood her! She made immense demand upon him, the final demand. “With my body I thee worship!” Was she afraid of refusal? Not at all — not at all! Alone with him in unknown country, in a half-empty inn, the night concealing all, he could not resist her. That he was not virgin, that he had spoken so freely of himself, only deepened her own desire. She would not be violating a boy. She would be offering her love to a man. For now she had rejected utterly the word infatuation. She loved him. Unwise, incredible, indeed reluctant, she was now irretrievably in love — not with a girl’s shallow emotion, but with a woman’s depth and power.
She took two steps toward the door and paused. Then resolutely she turned back again to the mirror and continued to take the pins out of her hair until it fell about her shoulders, a shimmering mass, out of which her face appeared, pale and of a startling beauty.