The Goddess Abides

Part Two

“I SUPPOSE IT BEGAN in Asia,” Jared Barnow said, “or, pinpointing further, in South Vietnam, in that beastly little war concentrated there.”

He had simply dropped in one evening in early autumn when, she thought, she had all but forgotten him in the absorption of the new house. She had chosen the land, twenty acres on a cliff, and had even picked the site for her house, among a cluster of wind-shaped cedars. She had driven home in a mood of contentment, if not of joy — for what had she to do with joy at this stage of her life? — and had found him waiting for her in the dusk on the terrace. He was pacing back and forth, impatient.

“No one knew where you were,” he complained. “It’s very unwise of you. Suppose something happened to you! Anything can happen these days. Where would I look for you?”

She smiled, telling him nothing. “I’ll join you in a jiffy.”

Half an hour later, she looked at him across the dinner table. Above the silver bowl of hothouse roses the candles flickered and Weston closed the French windows opening to the terrace and left the room.

“You’ve never told me about that part of your life.” she said.

“No.” He ate for a moment in silence, which she did not interrupt. Then he began again.

“I doubt I’ll ever tell you. There are parts of one’s life that must be closed, absolutely, except as they explain the present. I’ll tell you—”

But he did not tell her and she did not inquire, speaking instead of small present events in her own life, a new sonata she had begun, her piano lessons with a celebrated teacher. Then abruptly when they were in the library for coffee—“Let’s go to the library,” he had said. “The drawing room terrifies me, somehow”—and when the door was shut and they were alone he began again.

“This much is necessary to tell, perhaps because it gave me my direction. There was a rocket attack on Saigon. The enemy aim was never accurate and one of the rockets fell on a village just outside the city where we were stationed. It wasn’t a severe attack, it didn’t last long, but the damned thing fell on a huddle of children who were scrambling in the dust for some chocolates one of our men had thrown down. They were laughing and shouting when”—he closed his eyes and bit his lower lip and then went on—“the man who had tossed the sweets was blown to bits. Most of the kids weren’t so lucky. They were only wounded. We gathered the ones still alive and carried them to the makeshift hospital we’d set up in the village. There weren’t enough doctors or nurses. There never were.”

His hands trembled as he tried to light a cigarette and he gave it up. “There’s no use going into all of it. But that day I stood by at a makeshift operating table, trying to help a surgeon who was removing bits of metal from a child’s brain. I was horrified — and angry — to see the tools he was using: carpenter’s tools on gossamer! The boy died. I was glad for that. What could life be for him? But somehow all my anger at what had happened — was happening — centered on that clumsy tool. At least that could be improved! So — if you can imagine — out of fury, a dedication was born. I suppose one must call it dedication. It’s a drive, a concentration, a crystallization of purpose in my field, which, has always been science, but a practical science. I’m not purely a theorist. I like to see a theory put to use. My father was an engineer. I’ve inherited the instinct.”

He rose abruptly from his chair and, walking to the closed window he stood, his back to her as though he were gazing at the garden, now dimly appearing in the moonlight, and he went on talking.

“It wasn’t just the one child. Thousands! Even the Vietcong didn’t use napalm. We did. But we weren’t deliberately personally cruel as some of our own Vietnamese allies were. I saw a Vietnamese officer — there was a woman in a village just frozen in terror with two children clinging to her and another in her arms — shoot the children one after the other and then shoot her in the belly. Why? He was our ally — one of them. But it wasn’t a matter of one or a thousand. The children could never run fast enough. Bombs, bullets, mines, poisoned bamboo spikes, artillery shells, napalm — the whole works. Not just children, either, but everything seemed to center in that little boy whose brain I saw as that wretched instrument — exposed it. I was about to be discharged. I’d served my time. A week later I was on my way home. But I’ve never forgotten.”

She listened in silence as he revealed himself. He revealed himself and yet the revelation removed him infinitely far from her. She had lived her life in such safety, such peace, such remoteness from the world he had known that Edwin’s death, and even Arnold’s, dwindled now to mere incidents, inevitable and scarcely sorrowful. How could she comfort this young and stricken man? She felt a surge of helplessness, weakening in its power. She did not know what to say and so said nothing and felt the more helpless. Then suddenly he seemed to need no comfort. He turned resolutely and squared his shoulders.

“Why have I told you all that? I’ve never mentioned it before. I came home, I went to work. Who is to say that it was all meaningless? Pour me another cup of coffee, will you?”

He held out his cup and she filled it and he sat down again.

“So,” she said, putting the silver coffee pot on its tray, “what are you working on now, specifically?”

He smiled at her gratefully over the edge of his cup and, setting it down empty, he began with his usual enthusiasm. “I’m not ready yet for specifics. Basically I’m a physicist. That’s my training. I’d have proceeded in that field, remote from human lives, I suppose, and wandering further and further into nuclear physics, if I had not been thrown into Vietnam — from which I shall never extricate myself now, emotionally, at least, I have lost my interest in space. I’m earthbound. But if I’m to apply my physics, I need engineering, biomedical engineering.”

He frowned absently as he paused. He had forgotten her, she perceived, half jealously, and she pondered in some secret recess of her mind whether she should recall him by a feminine trick, an exclamation, softly uttered, that he was getting beyond her comprehension. So might she have done had she not been the daughter of Raymond Mansfield, that eminent scientist, who had lived so entirely as a scientist that she, alone with him in this house after the too-early death of her mother, had absorbed not only understanding of his scientific jargon, but an actual comprehension of his work with cosmic rays, at least to the degree of being able to help him with measuring and testing instrumentation. The exactitude demanded by such scientific pursuits had bred exactitude in her being, expressed in honesty carried sometimes to an extreme.

This honesty prevented her now from a feminine trick, and she merely said, rather quietly, “I understand. Of course, I haven’t followed the developments in engineering, but I remember my father’s impatience with his own imperfect instruments when he was measuring cosmic rays on mountaintops and in caves. He used to mutter to himself that goddamit why hadn’t he taken a course in ordinary engineering!”

Jared laughed. “Exactly! Well, universities today are planning courses in biomedical engineering and I shall simply have to—”

He broke off.

She waited, and then asked in the quiet almost indifferent voice with which she had been speaking, “And how, exactly, do you define biomedical engineering?”

He looked at her surprised and then considering. “Well, it’s an interdisciplinary sort of thing, as I think I’ve told you — multidisciplinary, if one is to be exact. For example, if I develop nuclear instrumentation — which I may decide upon — I must have electronic engineering for making my tools. But since I want to work in the medical field I must proceed further with biology.”

“That makes you a physico-biological engineer?”

“Exactly.”

He looked at her with suddenly quizzical eyes. “Strange talk, this, isn’t it? Between a young man and a beautiful woman?”

“It brings back my talks with my father, when I was a girl,” she said.

“You still don’t look more than a girl,” he said.

She felt his eyes upon her then and, looking up, met as surprised a gaze as though he saw her for the first time. Accustomed as she was to abrupt appreciation in a man’s look, she was instantly absurdly shy. She had often been told that she was a beautiful woman, although she did not think herself beautiful, being too tall, she thought, and inclined to be too thin and perhaps too fair, not at all voluptuous looking or anything of that sort. So she had thought somewhat apologetically when she was Arnold’s wife, yet here was the “look” again, as she called it to herself, a look unwelcome until now, when to her own surprise, it was not at all unpleasant. She met his dark eyes, not boldly in the least, but with a sort of pleading.

“I suppose it’s because I’m too thin,” she said, her voice so low as to sound breathless.

“You’re exactly right,” he replied firmly. “I’m glad you’re tall and leggy. I like it.”

She laughed, to evade this declaration. “What am I supposed to say now?”

“Whatever you feel,” he directed promptly.

“Well, then, I’m pleased, though surprised.”

“Come now — I don’t believe you’re surprised,”

He gazed at her, daring her, and she felt her cheeks flush. She was about to protest her age in self-protection and then did not, discovering in herself a reluctance even to think of the difference in their ages. What did it matter if really it did not? They were two human beings who by accident had been born a generation apart. So it had been with herself and Edwin, only that was different, was it not, since he was the man?

“What are you thinking of?” Jared asked suddenly.

She laughed in embarrassment “Has one person the right to ask that of another?”

“Meaning you won’t tell me?”

“Meaning I won’t tell you!”

They exchanged half-smiling, half-challenging looks and then she rose.

“Thank you for telling me about the child. I shan’t forget. It explains so much. Do you mind if I say good night? I’m a little tired tonight.”

…Safely in her own room and alone, she sat down before her dressing table and stared at herself in the oval, gilt-framed mirror that hung above it. What she saw was different, or so she imagined, from the woman she had looked at, without exactly seeing her, this morning when she was brushing her hair after her shower. This woman, reflecting herself now, looked, she decided, glowing — a ridiculous word. As though she were naïve enough to glow, if one must use the word, merely because a young man seemed inclined toward falling in love with an older woman who happened to be herself! Older she was, and she had all the sophistication, she believed, that a woman should have at her age.

Her acquaintance, if not her friendship, was wide, and she was quite accustomed to the attachments between men and women these days, old and young, young and old. For that matter, what about herself and Edwin? But could she ever have explained that relationship to Arnold? Perhaps life was merely a series of experiences that could not be explained even to one’s self. And it was true that she now looked years younger than she was, which she had not before Arnold died, or indeed, even before Edwin died. Alone, she had in fact reverted to her own natural youthfulness, the effect, perhaps, of complete freedom, in which it was not necessary to share anything of herself, her time, her thoughts, with anyone else.

“And I shan’t give up my precious freedom to anyone now,” she said to the woman in the mirror. She smiled and the woman smiled back at her. Yes, she thought, taking the pins out of her hair, she had said goodnight to Jared Barnow at exactly the right moment. He possessed a powerful animal magnetism which she was too intelligent not to recognize. She was aware, too, of the possibility of response within herself. Beneath the fastidiousness of her taste, the restraints of her upbringing, she was strongly sexed, how strongly she did not know — did not, indeed, want to know. Such knowledge could be very upsetting, the consequences too serious to be worth the experience. She was not afraid of the judgments of other persons, for in these days of laxity and indulgence such judgments were so light as to cause little more than amusement, but she dreaded the consequences in herself. Knowing the intensity of her feelings, she knew also that if she allowed herself to consider an — attachment, call it, she might not be able to control it. Then again her new freedom would be lost.

She began to brush her hair vigorously and the long bright stuff fell over her face like a flimsy veil.

…“You have a strange effect on me,” Jared announced at the breakfast table.

“Yes?” Her eyebrows lifted. She was quite herself this morning after a night’s deep sleep, her mind relaxed after decision.

“A creative effect,” he went on. “Instead of distracting me, as I’ve known myself to be distracted by an attractive woman, you — I hate to use the word inspire, it’s so misused, but that’s what it amounts to for me. You start my ideas into ferment. I’ve not met a woman before who appeals to every side of me — mentally, emotionally — and now, physically, too.”

He spoke simply and without embarrassment, as he might have done had he been explaining a new theory. She listened, her eyes upon his, and answered as simply.

“That’s wonderful to hear.”

He waited, their eyes still meeting. “Well?” he said after a moment.

She smiled. “Well what?”

“Is that all?”

“What more can there be?”

“Any more, as much as you wish.”

Silence fell, a portentous silence, swelling into an immense possibility. He was looking at her steadfastly — daring her perhaps? A word, a sign of yielding, and they might be thrown into a moment irretrievable in its implications. She was aware of his readiness, his hand waiting there on the edge of the table, his whole being waiting and ready. She withdrew involuntarily from the challenge.

“Let’s talk about something else,” she said.

He was silent then and fell to his eggs and bacon, until she broke the continuing silence, her voice casual. “Must you work today or have you time for a horseback ride?”

“You ride?”

“I’ve taken it up again. I used to ride a great deal as a girl, but my husband didn’t care for it.”

“He didn’t appreciate you.” His voice was accusing, his mouth sulky.

“In his way he did — very much,” she insisted.

“Then he didn’t understand you.”

She laughed. “Oh, come, that’s too trite — husbands that don’t understand wives, wives that don’t understand husbands! You haven’t told me about the girl who wants to marry you. Is she interested in your work?”

“She wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

“You remind me of my son, Tony. He married a charming, stupid girl. And he’s quite intelligent! I suggested that she was perhaps a little stupid — only I didn’t use the word — when he told me he wanted to marry her, and he replied that he didn’t want a damned intelligent woman to come home to at night.”

She laughed once more but he did not laugh with her. He looked at her gravely, scrambled egg poised on his fork. “He’s a damned fool, I’d say!”

“Oh, no, Tony’s not a fool. Just had enough of his mother! I felt quite pleased — an only son not attached to his mother? That’s success for the mother these days.”

He ate the egg, reflecting. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about husbands and wives, sons and mothers,” he said peevishly.

“Only about you and the girl—” she said.

“Not even about her. All right, let’s go riding now. I have an appointment this afternoon.” He rose and pushed his chair in as he spoke.

…Riding, she thought remorsefully, was not a good idea after all. He rode superbly, his slender figure erect and elegant, the reins loose in his hand and yet controlled. Then there was the weather, a warm bright day, sunlight dappled through the trees on either side of the trail, the autumn-tinted hills rolling away to the horizon. She knew she looked well in her riding clothes and at the thought was severe with herself again. Had there been some secret impulse of coquetry which she had not recognized this morning at the breakfast table? No, she had simply been happy, a bright morning, a comfortable, even beautiful house, a pleasant companion. And surely there was no danger in admiring this companion, young and handsome, oh, very young and very handsome!

“Why are you smiling at me?” he demanded.

“Secret thought,” she said. “Come, let’s gallop!”

She touched her whip to her horse’s flank and led the way down the trail and into the valley. And flying along under the cloudless sky, she thought of the house on the cliff, nonexistent and yet as real to her imagination as though it stood there. Should she tell him of that house? Yield to the impulse to reveal herself to him? No! The decision cut clean across the impulse. She would not reveal herself — not yet. She slowed her horse to a canter and glanced at her wristwatch.

“It’s noon — you have an appointment.”

“Why do you try to escape me?” he cried.

“Do I?” she asked, and then, avoiding his eyes, she touched the whip to her horse’s flank and broke again into a gallop.

…“You do try to escape me, you know,” he said an hour later. He had declined luncheon, declaring that he had no time and now he was taking his leave. They stood at the door and he looted down into her upturned face.

She met his gaze frankly. “I don’t try to escape you — it’s just that I—”

She broke off, he waited.

“You’ll be late,” she said.

“I’ll be late,” he agreed, and waited.

“I don’t know how to answer you,” she said at last.

“Ah, that’s better. So next time we’ll find out why you can’t answer me.”

He stooped and kissed her mouth, very swiftly, very lightly, so that she could not step back or turn her head to avoid him. Then he was gone.

…He left an effect behind. She felt his absence so strongly that it became a presence. The silence in the house, his firm declarative voice no longer to be heard, his restlessness, moving from his chair, getting up to look out a window, to play for five minutes at the piano, to go to a bookshelf and pull out a book and glance through it while he talked and then put it back without speaking of it while he talked of something else — an infinite restlessness of the mind invading the body, his whole dominating, brilliant, demanding personality everywhere in the house, all this suddenly no more, was only an affirmation of himself.

She sat down when he was gone, her lips tingling with the kiss, and then as abruptly rose, refusing to recognize the surge of physical longing in her body. Let her recognize its meaning! There had been no great personal excitement in her life with Arnold, but there had been sexual content. He was not distasteful to her, and his approach was with a mature man’s understanding of a wife’s need. He had been considerate and appreciative, and she had been the same toward him, she believed. Certainly she did not want an extramarital love affair as so many women did nowadays, not merely on moral grounds but because she had no need of it. Now let her face the fact that missing the regularity of her somewhat placid life with Arnold and perhaps even the stimulation of Edwin’s touch, her natural desires, long awakened and customarily assuaged, were making demand upon her.

There was no need for shame or even embarrassment in this, a situation severely common enough, she reflected, when a wife lost her husband or a woman her lover. She had simply to face life as it was now and make her choices. She had chosen to live alone and explore her freedom. Therefore she must turn her mind, her imagination, away from Jared as a male. Let her put it as frankly as that, let her think of him as a human being, a friend and no more. Thus she admonished herself. Think no more of how he looks, she decided sternly; think instead of his mind, his interests, his career, all the aspects of his strong personality. There was no reason why she should not enjoy these, in freedom, instead of allowing an emotion to seize control of herself.

I shall prepare myself to be his friend, she thought, and remembering his admiration for her father, she slipped back into the days when she had been her father’s daughter, the only one in his house who understood what he was talking about when he spoke of his work with cosmic rays, the only one who wanted to understand. And she had wanted to understand because she loved him and knew that, successful scientist that he was and famous everywhere in the world, he was lonely in his own house.

“Your mother is a darling good woman,” he used to say to her, “and I’ve been a poor sort of husband, to her, my mind always somewhere else, even when she’s talking to me. It’s no wonder she loses patience with me. I don’t blame her a bit.”

Her answer to this had been silence, then throwing her arms about him, then finally an endless patience with Arnold when he wanted to talk with her, though his work as a lawyer was monotonously dull, she thought, yet if she felt impatient, and she had, very often, she had only to remember her lonely father, and, yes, her impatient, lonely mother, filling her days with household detail, and her own impatience died. Yes, her father was lonely as only scientists can be lonely, working as they do and must with the vast concerns of the universe.

It occurred to her now that Jared, too, must be lonely, young though he was, but so much more brilliant than his fellows and living alone, too, with an old uncle. She could easily mend that loneliness and without thinking of it as a love affair, which indeed was the last experience she wanted. Once during her marriage she had been strongly attracted to a handsome man of her own age, a bitter time it had been, she hated the very memory of it, for the attraction had been purely physical, and she was thankful for that, for if she had been able to respect the man, she could not have resisted him. She had resisted, but she remembered and would always remember the frightening power of her own impulses, compelling her to yield herself until the impulse, resisted, became an actual pain, so intolerable that she had begged Arnold to take her to Europe that summer. Whether he knew why she had been so importunate she never knew and did not want to know even now. He had listened to her pleading, and had not asked why she was weeping while she talked, nor could she tell him why.

“Of course, my dear,” he said. “I shall enjoy a vacation myself. There now — you’re in a state of nerves — I’ve noticed it lately. You do too much — so many charities and so on and the children are at a trying age. I don’t at all like the way Millicent answers you when you speak to her.”

Millicent! That daughter of hers, now a complacent wife and mother, had she known why her mother had been so impatient and abstracted in those days? Had she perhaps ever seen them together, her mother and the extravagantly handsome man with blue eyes and dark hair silvered at the temples — a thin, aggressive, sharply pretty adolescent Millicent, critical with love for her father and jealous of her mother—

She put away such memories and thought of Jared in other terms. She would learn to know his mind, his thought, and in such ways assuage his loneliness, and her own need.

…“But you’re looking so well,” her daughter exclaimed.

“Should I not?” she inquired.

Millicent herself did not look well, she thought. The young woman had let herself gain weight, and her hair, dark as Arnold's had been, looked unbrushed, even unwashed, and she wore a dull blue suit that needed pressing.

“But you’re rejuvenated,” Millicent insisted so accusingly that her mother laughed.

“And is that sinful?”

They were in her upstairs sitting room, and here Millicent had found her not fifteen minutes ago. But it was her daughter’s habit to let months pass without communication and then drop in upon her without warning.

“No,” Millicent said reluctantly. “Not exactly,” she added. She glanced at the papers on the desk where her mother sat, leaning forward and craning her neck to do so. “What are you drawing?”

“Plans for an imaginary house,” she replied.

“House — that’s what I’ve come about,” Millicent exclaimed. “Your looking so blooming put me off. Tom wants a week’s deer hunting in Vermont and I thought I’d go along with the children if you can lend us the house.”

“Of course,” she said. Then moved by a sudden and inexplicable impulse, she continued, “As a matter of fact, I’ll give you the house, if you like.”

“Why?” Millicent asked bluntly.

She hesitated. “I don’t know exactly — except it’s too lonely there for me.”

“I can understand that,” Millicent said. “There’s no one in the world who could take Father’s place.”

“No. Nor would I wish it otherwise.”

“Of course not.”

They exchanged looks, hers smiling and a little sad, Millicent’s almost curious. Then her daughter rose and, approaching, stooped to kiss her cheek. “I can’t stay, Mother.”

“You need a new suit,” Edith said gently.

“Do I? Well, I won’t get one! Tom’s thinking of a new job. We’d have to move to San Francisco, though.”

“Oh — so far?”

“It is far, but what can I do?”

“Go with him, of course — what else? But when?”

“That’s the question. Tom said not to tell you until it’s certain. But it slipped out.”

“I’ll keep it to myself. And what’s distance nowadays? Or time?”

“True! Well, good-bye, Mother. Of course I’ll see you before we go, if we go!”

They clasped hands and she clung to her daughter's hand.

“And if it’s to be, when would it be?”

“We count on the end of the month, in time for Christmas in the new place.”

Her daughter was gone, and she was alone again. Christmas? It meant then that the house would be empty. Tony’s wife wanted their children to have Christmas in their own home. Arnold’s death meant one change after another in her life. This old house remained as it was but everything in it was changed. It had really been his house, then! At least without him all its ways and habits were meaningless. If she continued to live here, she would live in a growing melancholy that in the end would stifle her. She took the receiver from the telephone desk.

“Is this the Wilton Real Estate office? Yes? Then may I speak to Robert Wilton, Senior? A few minutes? I’ll wait—”

She waited until a hearty voice resounded at her ear.

“Yes, Mrs. Chardman! What can I do for you? Do you want to sell your house? I could make a fine sale for you if you—”

“Not yet, thanks! On the contrary, I want to buy.”

“Well, now! You’re moving?”

“There’s a piece of land I want to own. Perhaps I’ll put up a house of sorts, just for myself. It’s by the sea—”

“Understandable, entirely understandable — a place by the sea. I seem to remember you always hankered — but I think Mr. Chardman didn’t quite — still and all, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have what you want now.”

“None at all,” she agreed.

“Where is this land?”

“It’s in North Jersey, near a town but not in it. A part of a great estate, I think, on a cliff with surrounding forest. One passes several of those great old houses—”

She gave exact directions, and heard him breathing heavily as he took notes.

“What’s your price range, Mrs. Chardman?” he asked.

“I just — want it,” she said.

He laughed. “Then I suppose you must have it! Why not?”

“Why not?” she agreed again.

…The filmy flakes of an early snowfall were drifting through the morning air. The sky was gray, a November gray, that morning as she opened the heavy front door. Even the door seemed heavier than usual, and she had more than once complained to Arnold about that door, hanging on immense brass hinges. Weston held the door open a moment now.

“I’m glad, madame, that you decided against driving yourself. It looks like a real snow — so quiet and all.”

“Please tell Agnes not to disturb the papers on my desk upstairs when she is dusting.”

“Yes, madame.”

“I’ll stop somewhere for luncheon but I should be home for dinner.”

“Alone, madame?”

She hesitated. “I think I’ll ask Miss Darwent to dine with me tonight.”

She went to the telephone in the hall and dialed. “Amelia? Yes, it’s Edith. I have an errand today in Jersey, but I’ll be back in time for dinner. Will you dine with me? Eight o’clock — that gives me plenty of time. Oh, good—”

She hung up, and turned to Weston, patiently waiting. “She’ll come, and she likes fresh lobster, remember!"

“Yes, madame.”

She was off, then, and the heavy door shut behind her. The driveway made a circle and from the window of the car, through the drifting snow, she saw for an instant the formidable house of gray stone, standing like a German baronial castle in the midst of tall dark evergreens. Somehow she must escape that castle, but which way escape lay she did not know. And why was she pinning her faith on a house? The land was now about to be hers, however, the site, the place, the view over the ocean, the cliff, the small semicircular steps to the beach. Wilton Senior had accomplished that much. The estate was in the hands of heirs, and they had been eager to sell and, learning of this, she had offered to triple the acreage upon which she had first planned. She now owned sixty acres, far more than she needed, but they gave her room, and a wider view. She would let it grow wild. There would be no formal gardens, no cutting and clipping.

The morning slipped away in silence. The chauffeur drove smoothly and swiftly. Arnold had trained him to a controlled speed but she had increased the speed to the limit in recent months and without sign of protest or surprise he had accepted the change as though he understood why she wanted now to be driven faster. What he thought she did not know, a silent man, still young in her terms, at least — perhaps forty? She knew nothing about him and it never occurred to her to ask. Now, however, shut in by the snow, she felt the silence oppressive and broke it.

“William, are you married — children and so on?”

“No, ma’am. I live with my old mother.”

“Old? How old?”

“Sixty-three, ma’am.”

“In Philadelphia?”

“At present, ma’am. We used to live in North Jersey. My mother was housekeeper in one of them big old houses. That’s how I know where to go now, ma’am. I grew up in those parts.”

“Oh? And did you know the Medhursts?”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s where my mother worked.”

“How strange! I’ve bought some of the Medhurst land.”

“So I’ve heard, ma’am.”

She fell into surprised silence. Nothing in her life could be really private, she supposed, for Arnold had been well known in financial circles. But why should she care? She was herself the daughter of a famous man, the widow of a prosperous one. She had no need of secrets, and would have none, she decided firmly. To have no secrets was to be truly free. And so in this mood of freedom she arrived at her destination where she found Wilton Senior waiting in his car. He came to her at once.

“I brought the necessary papers for you to sign, Mrs. Chardman. I think everything is in order, provided you’re satisfied.”

“Let me just look at my view and see if it is all I remembered.”

The snow had momentarily ceased and she walked to the edge of the cliff and looked over the heaving gray sea. There was no wind to drive the waves to whitecaps, but far below her the surf broke heavily against the rocks that surrounded the beach. The chauffeur came to her side, also.

“I used to run down them steps, ma’am, when I was a kid, that is, and in the early morning before the family was up — all except Master Robert — Bob they called him. He wasn’t so much older than me. There’s good crabbing on that beach when the tide goes out.”

“The steps don’t look very safe now,” she observed.

“No, ma’am. But I could put them into shape easily enough. I’m handy that way.”

“Perhaps I’ll ask you to do it for me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He went away when she said no more, and she continued to look out over the sea. Whether she ever built the house, this land was now hers. The house could be or could never be, but she stood firmly on her own land. The snow was beginning to fall again. She felt the flakes cold against her face, like the touch of cold fingertips, and she turned to Wilton Senior.

“I am ready to sign the papers,” she said.

…“Whatever became of that house you were going to build?” Amelia inquired over the dinner table.

She had been absorbed in the lobster and until now she had asked no questions. Indeed, there had been no time, for Edith had been late. The snow had increased into a quiet storm, so that when Weston opened the heavy door it was to inform her immediately that Miss Darwent had already arrived and was waiting in the library, the drawing room being too chilly for her, since the north wind had begun to blow on that side of the house.

“Tell her I’ll be down in five minutes — I’ll just change — and dinner can be served at once.”

“Yes, madame”" He hesitated and then went on, “I did tell the chauffeur when you were to be back, madame.”

She paused at the foot of the stairs to smile, remembering the jealous hostility between these two faithful servants. “It wasn’t his fault. The snow is already deep.”

“Very well, madame.”

In a few minutes she and Amelia were at the table in the dining room, where a fire blazed under the marble chimney piece. Amelia had drunk her clear soup promptly and was now busy with broiled lobster and melted butter, her napkin tucked into her collar.

“It’s still only in the mind,” Edith replied.

“You’ll never find a more comfortable house than this,” Amelia said. She was cracking a huge claw in a pair of pincers, and it gave way suddenly with a loud report.

“It will have a different sort of comfort,” Edith said, and then smiling at her old friend, she went on, “If I had anything to tell you, I would tell you, Amelia. The truth is, I am in a curious state of mind, not confused really, but searching. I haven’t quite found myself, I don’t quite know what I want, or where it can be found. I’m just — enjoying life in a queer sort of way, perhaps not really facing anything — I don’t know.”

Amelia put down claw and pincers. “You’re idle, that’s what. You need something to do. Why don’t you find a charity or something?”

“I don’t want or need busy work,” Edith replied. “I have my music — and books I haven’t read and—”

“And what?” Amelia demanded when she paused.

“And friends. That’s why I asked you to come here tonight. I haven’t seen you—”

Amelia interrupted. “Who is that long-legged fellow who has been here a couple of times?”

“He’s someone I happened to meet last whiter in Vermont. He is an admirer of my father—”

“Not of you?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Amelia!”

“Well, you’re ripe for it. I know — I’ve watched my friends when they’ve become widows after having faithful husbands like Arnold, especially pretty widows!”

“Please, Amelia!”

“Oh, very well, Edith! Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to tell me.”

“Amelia, there’s nothing to tell.”

“Then why did you suddenly invite me to dinner?”

“Because I was lonely. I dreaded coming back to this great dark old house. And — and—”

“Be careful,” Amelia said. “You’re getting in the mood for anything. I’ll have some more of the asparagus, Weston.”

…“So why don’t you come with me?” Jared asked.

His voice came clear and strong over the telephone. It was a crisp fine morning, the day before Christmas, and she had been wondering how she would spend the holiday. Millicent and her family had already moved to San Francisco, they had made telephone exchanges. The children were enchanted with the beautiful playgrounds, the beaches, the parks.

“And you?” Edith inquired.

“I’m going to have a maid,” Millicent cried, “and of course I’m enchanted. Tom has a good raise.”

“Then he’s on his way up and all is well,” she had said.

With this she had not forgotten her daughter exactly, but she was at ease about her and could forget her if she liked, very much as she habitually forgot Tony because really she was not needed any more, and so was free this morning to linger over breakfast, answer the telephone when it rang, and hear Jared’s clear voice at her ear. She gazed out the wide French windows meanwhile. The sky was cloudlessly blue, but the last leaves were fluttering down from the big oak tree by the east terrace. She had finished breakfast, and was deciding what to do with the day, something vigorous, she had thought, for she was feeling unusually well, and awake, impatient for physical exercise, perhaps a canter alone along the edge of the woods.

“But when?” she asked, uncertain.

“I’ll pick you up this afternoon and we’ll motor down the eastern coast. Have pity on me. My old uncle is in the Virgin Islands — he hates the cold. And I can’t think of anyone I’d rather spend Christmas with than you.”

“You don’t want to go to Vermont?”

“No. I want to take you to strange places where neither of us has ever been. Let’s just wander.”

She considered for a moment. On the inside pane of the wide window a late bee buzzed frantically, lost from its fellows, and she let herself be diverted.

“There’s a bee buzzing on the window. If I let it out will it freeze?”

“No,” he said. “It will find its way home.”

“Then wait a minute,” she said.

She opened the window and brushed the bee outdoors with her handkerchief. It flew away instantly, but the cold sweet air rushed into the room and she let it blow upon her face. The sharp chill stung her flesh and stirred her blood, she had not realized how close the air in this old house was, a scent not unpleasant, of leatherbound books and many Oriental rugs and hothouse flowers. A rush of impetuous desire for freshness and new vigor swept over her and she closed the window.

“I’ll be ready,” she called into the telephone.

“Good — at half past two,” he said.

…The road wound in and out along the coast. For miles the sea was hidden, the road entering the forest and then as suddenly emerging again to the curve of a bay or a beach. The sun slipped slowly downward in the western sky and they stopped at twilight at an inn, an old mansion, its pillared portico reaching to the roof. Jared pulled up at the entrance.

“We’ve been very quiet,” he said.

“Yes,” she replied.

Neither of them had felt like talking, it seemed. He had driven the small convertible in concentrated thought and she had not interrupted. A few times he had noticed the landscape.

“Those rocks down there by the sea—” he said.

“As though they had been tumbled there by a giant—” she replied.

The air had been golden with sunlight through the afternoon, turning at sunset to rose and crimson. Evening star and a crescent moon hung over the trees and a beneficent calm pervaded her — and him, too, she felt, a relaxed mood which was in itself communication between them. She was happy in his presence, she now realized, happier than she had been for a long time, happier perhaps than she had ever been. Certainly with no one had she felt this conviction of life and its goodness, this ease of presence with another human being. She turned to him impulsively and found him looking at her, dark eyes questioning.

“Shall we stop here? Dine and then walk on the beach?”

“Yes,” she said. “In this air — what is that scent? Fines, I think. It is too late in the year for flowers, though it’s still warm in this climate.”

“Pines warmed by the day’s sun,” he said. “And shall we stay here for the night? At this season the inn will be nearly empty, I daresay — people at home for Christmas, but you and I are making our own Christmas.”

“Let us stay,” she said.

He gave her a look, passionate and deep, and for an instant she wondered what it meant. There could be no question, surely there could be no question about rooms, separate rooms. She was startled to discover in herself the question answered, hidden in her own being a reluctant yearning to forget her years and her reserves. She was no longer any man’s wife. She was free to be what she wished to be, to do what she wanted to do. There was no need to refuse herself — or him — anything that pleased them. She had fulfilled all duties to others.

“Then I will engage our rooms,” he said.

He left her in the car while he entered the office of the inn and she sat alone, a sweet intoxication pervading her. She recognized it without ever having felt it before, a powerful attraction to this man, an attraction of mind first, but so complete that it flowed through her body in a warm current. She tried to stay it, to control it, to analyze it. Let her remember herself. Let her ask herself what she truly wanted — no complications, she told herself, no foolish complications of emotion. Above all, no heartbreak at this time of her life.

He came back in a moment, very cheerful, very composed.

“I got adjoining rooms,” he said. “If you want anything you can call me.”

…She woke in the night as usual after five hours of sleep. That was her habit — five hours of deep dreamless sleep and then she woke absolutely, her mind clear and aware. Moonlight streamed through the open window and the air was crisply chill. She pulled the covers about her shoulders and breathed deeply. There was a smell of the sea, the softly rushing sound of distant surf. This was how it would be in her house on the cliff when she slept there alone. Only now she was not alone. That is to say, Jared was on the other side of the closed door, not locked, only closed. She was suddenly acutely aware that it was not locked, only closed.

“There’s no telephone between rooms in an old inn like this,” Jared had said. “I’ll not lock the door in case of — anything.”

She had not replied. Instead she had stood quite still in the center of this big square room with its four-poster double bed.

“I hate to say good night,” Jared said.

“It was a delightful dinner,” she said. “I didn’t know how hungry I was.”

“Oh, I’m always a hungry beast.” He twisted his handsome mouth in a wry smile as he spoke.

“You should be to cover that big skeleton of yours,” she said.

He had not replied to this. Instead, after an instant of looking at her intently, he had put his arms about her and kissed her full on her lips.

“Good night, you darling,” he said, and opening the door between the rooms, he closed it firmly.

…Now, lying in the big bed, she thought of the kiss. He had simply given it, taken it, without asking and without comment. She felt again the young warmth of his lips against hers as she remembered the moment. But was she not being ridiculous? What was a kiss nowadays? Women kissed men, men kissed women, with no feeling beyond a cheerful friendliness. Ah, but not she! She had never been one to give kisses easily or to welcome them. Even with Arnold they had seemed — unnecessary. As for Edwin, his kisses had been those of a child — or an old, old man, tender but pure. So what had this kiss been, this kiss which she still felt upon her lips? Then she rebuked herself again. The truth was that no one kissed her nowadays and she kissed no one. This one kiss lingered in her memory now merely because it was unaccustomed.

Then at this moment, as though to refute this self-deception, her body rose to defy her. She was suddenly seized by a surge of physical longing such as she had not known for years. No, let her be honest with herself. She had never known such longing, perhaps because she had always before this had the means of satisfaction. Now a door stood between and it was only closed, not locked. Suppose the impossible, suppose she got up from this alien bed, suppose she wrapped her rose silk negligée about her — it lay there on the chair — and suppose that she opened the door softly into that other room and then went in, even if it were only to stand and look at him as he slept. And if he woke and saw her standing there—

No, it could not be done. Perhaps, if she could be sure that he would not wake? But how could that be sure? And suppose his eyes opened, how could she know what she would see there? She did not know him well enough. She could not risk the possible rejection. She was too proud. Of course there were women who could cast away all pride, women who would count on physical response whatever the cost, but she knew herself. She could not escape herself, shamed. She would walk in shame, thereafter, and then whom would she have? She had only herself.

She lay rigid with desire, refusing to move, refusing to rise, refusing to walk across the floor, refusing the very imagination of what it would be to open the door and see him lying there, even sleeping. She forbade it to herself, until at last the throbbing of her body subsided and she slept.

…In the morning when she woke the memory of the night remained vividly with her, nevertheless. She lay remembering, and she listened. He was already up. Through the thin wooden door she could hear him moving about, and she listened for a moment and then got out of her bed and turned on the shower and dressed, putting on another suit than the one she had worn yesterday with her sable jacket. She wanted to be beautiful today, really beautiful, and aware that she was changeful in her looks, sometimes looking almost plain, she took pains with every detail. Ah, but she had not cared until now! Amelia was disgustingly right. Though she had no lover, yet the possibility of love produced a new vitality, stemming from the enlivened heart, the quickened bloodstream. Life became worth living again. The experience of the night had changed him for her, and she knew now she could love him. Yet she would not let herself say, even in the silence of her heart, that already she loved him. She was too sophisticated for that. She did not know him well enough, and might never know him well enough, for the completeness and the complexity of the true meaning of love, a word she never allowed herself to use as she daily heard it used, carelessly, and in regard to a multiplicity of objects and persons, expressing mere fondness or exaggerated liking.

No, she recognized the longing of last night for what it was, a yearning in her loneliness for a companionship most easily and simply expressed through a shared physical experience. She was grateful that she had forbidden herself. Nothing could be less gratifying to her than such an experience, prematurely expressed, so that afterward their relationship would have come to an abrupt end.

Their relationship — what was it? She asked herself the question and her only answer was another question. What could their relationship be, accepting as they must the difference in their ages? Let her crucify herself upon that fact! Yet had she not been even younger than some of Edwin’s children? Ah, but he was a venerable man, a philosopher, dreaming of love as a philosophy, the shadow of himself as he lay beside her, a white ghost in the night. She had loved him for his beauty but her love had not been impelled by longing. She gave it gladly because he deserved every gift she could give, and this for no other reason except that he was worthy. Nor had she now any regret whatsoever.

Arnold of course would never have understood, nor, she guessed, could Jared, if he ever knew. For that matter, she herself did not understand. Probably her nature being human and no less selfish than that of other persons, she needed the comfort of Edwin’s adoration. Perhaps that was all it was, an inglorious need, just as for years she had accepted Arnold’s faithful love as her husband, returning what she could of her own love as his wife, which was, nevertheless, as she very well knew, much less in measure than his.

It occurred to her later, as she sat facing Jared at the breakfast table, that she was in grave danger of loving him as she had never before loved anyone. The morning sun shone full on him, she having chosen to sit with her back to the window, and thus she saw all too delightfully well his clear dark eyes, the firm line of his brow, his straight nose and beautifully sculptured mouth, all details of a totally unnecessary beauty. He was lit with a morning joy, ready to laugh, hungry for food and eager for pleasure — and innocent, she thought, touchingly innocent, at least so far as she was concerned. She rubbed salt relentlessly into the wound of this conviction.

“Tell me,” she said, “how it is that you are not with that pretty girl of yours?”

He was eating scrambled eggs assiduously.

“She is pretty,” he said, “but she has a handicap — a huge noisy father. He’s divorced and married again. I wouldn’t mind his noise, if it were occasionally a little more than that, but it isn’t. Just noise — noise — noise.”

“Come now,” she said laughing. “Define this noise.”

“Well, hail-fellow-well-met, back-slapping, h’are ya, Jared, old boy stuff!”

“How did she come to have such a father?”

“She’s not like that, at all, herself.”

“No? What is she like?”

“Rather tall, but not very. Quiet. I think perhaps she’s stubborn, or perhaps only pertinacious. Or again, maybe she’s not quiet except when she’s with me and she thinks that’s the way I like her to be.”

“Why not just encourage her to be herself?”

“Well, you see, as I said, I don’t know what that is. Did I ever tell you that I love your hands?”

“No. What makes you think of them at this instant?”

“I’m looking at them — that’s why. They’re telling hands.”

She gazed down at her ringless hands. “What does that mean?”

“They tell me what you are.”

She resisted the impulse to ask what that was. Instead she pressed the crown of thorns upon her head.

“If you know hands so well, why can’t you tell what your girl is like?”

“Oh, her hands!” He laughed shortly and then was suddenly grave. “I wish you wouldn’t call her my girl. She’s — well, not that, anyway.”

“But?”

“I don’t know. It’s a problem.”

“She is?”

“No. I am. Perhaps I shouldn’t marry. I’m too involved in this work I’ve chosen. Even now, sitting here opposite you on this glorious morning, with a whole glorious day ahead of us, I am thinking about something I’m trying to do — to create, that is. It’s an artificial hand, a great improvement over anything we have now. Perhaps I was looking at your hands without knowing why I did, exactly. A man such as I am — I’m always at my work. It’s in me, the inventing, the planning. Take the hand, for instance—”

He held up his own right hand, spare and shapely. “The saddest thing about someone’s losing a hand is that the feeling power is gone. A hand is not only an implement, it’s a sense organ. It’s the eye of a blind man, it’s the tongue of those who cannot speak. I am working on an artificial hand which is so articulated that it can almost feel. Surgeons tell amputees that artificial hands can work for them but they can’t feel. Well, I’m about to make one that does feel — at least it feels shapes and maybe even textures. There’ll be feeling fingers instead of a hook or a claw. Think of touching a woman’s cheek with a hook or a claw — or think of never being able to feel a woman’s cheek at all!”

“You are an artist,” she said. “But then all scientists are artists, my father used to say. You think like an artist, at any rate, and I can see that you want what you create to be a work of art.”

He put down his knife and fork, and beckoned the waiter.

“Coffee again, please, and get the check ready. And you’re very intuitive, Edith! I want to see something that I can see only half blindly, as a musician goes about creating a symphony. He hasn’t any idea of how to do it, but he blunders along, inventing as he goes. That’s me, too. It’s only the artist in a human being that makes him creative. Without it he’s no more than a technician. God, but it’s fun to talk to you! I hope you don’t mind my calling you Edith? It’s a beautiful name and it suits you perfectly.”

“If you like it, use it,” she said.

“I am Jared, of course.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“I should have thought of it before, but we’ve been close even without names. I often wonder why I am so close to you — I’ve never had this feeling before, not with anyone. But the minute I saw you — remember that snowy night? You opened the door of your Vermont house to me and I was startled because I felt I’d found someone I’d been looking for, though I hadn’t been conscious of looking for anyone. At that moment I knew that somehow — I didn’t know how and I still don’t know — my life would be linked with yours as long as we live.”

She heard these grave words with dread and exultation. For he spoke them gravely, his voice earnest, his eyes gazing steadfastly into hers, and she received them as gravely. This was not the light speech of a playful young man to an older woman. He was not such a young man. Lighthearted and whimsical as he could be at times, he was profoundly serious as she had already perceived, weighted she sometimes felt by the very magnitude of his talents. She had never known so talented a human being, she herself talented enough to recognize the effect of overburdening talent. Some of her own loneliness through the years, she had suspected, came from her recognition that neither of her children had inherited the brilliance of her father’s gifts. Accustomed as she had become to his special affection throughout her childhood and youth, she sometimes felt, half guiltily, that this had made Arnold and the children she had had by him dull by comparison. For this guilt she had tried to atone by meticulous attention to what she had considered duty. Now there was no longer need to think of duty and in the delight of this new relationship she recaptured, too, some of the joy of her youth. Concepts, ideas, words that she had not used except with her father flowed now from the storage of her memory, waiting to be spoken when needed.

Through the long sunlit morning such thoughts came and went through her mind but she did not speak them. Indeed as the miles sped by neither of them spoke. He drove expertly, but he was far away in some distant space of his own, and she, recognizing such absence, for her father had habitually slipped away into similar abstraction, sat in silence and relaxed happiness. The landscape was mild and without snow, the rounded hills and shallow valleys were still tinged with green, the people were amiable and unhurried. There was little sign even of Christmas. So quiet was the day that the quietude invaded her own being until she wondered if she had dreamed her passion of the night before.

…“I don’t understand the nature of love,” he said.

It was such a Christmas Day as she had never had. They stopped at noon near a small town, a mere village whose name she did not know, and took their Christmas dinner in a restaurant that was the only one open. The proprietor was an old man, without family, he told them, else he would have been in his own home.

“Buried my wife ten years ago,” he said cheerfully.

Now, the meal over, they walked along the beach and Jared, out of unusual lightheartedness and chaffing, had suddenly become serious and declared that he did not understand the nature of love. She leaned against the twisted weather-beaten trunk of a dead pine and waited for further communication. He stood beside her, looking out to sea. The day was quiet and the sea was still, but the first ripples of the incoming tide fringed the shore with white. He continued.

“What I really mean to say is that I don’t understand my own state of mind.”

She waited, having learned that though he was articulate enough when he spoke of his work, he was not at all articulate about himself, not because he was shy, she perceived, but because he was not accustomed to thinking about himself.

“For example,” he went on, “when I am with you I am in the most curious contentment. I can’t call it anything else — contentment. I feel I am somehow in my element. You make no demands on me. Do you realize, I wonder, how unusual it is for a woman to make no demands on a man? I don’t have to charm you!”

She laughed. “I find you charming exactly as you are!”

He did not laugh in reply. Instead he continued to speak in the same half-musing mood. “No, I’ve never felt like this toward any woman. I have a sense of homecoming, of there being no need for secrets between us.”

“Have you secrets?”

“Of course! A man of my age with no secrets? Impossible — in this day, anyway! I’ve played the fool as much as any man. My uncle — bless his reticences — could never bring himself to give me any advice and I stumbled along on my own, always too old for myself, always ahead of my own years. Yet I don’t understand the nature of love.” He turned to face her. “Mind you, I’m no innocent. I’m precocious in everything. A woman initiated me when I was thirteen…Well, I let myself be initiated!”

“Don’t tell me about it,” she said quickly.

“I will tell you,” he insisted. “I was in school — prep school — and one of the masters had an ardent wife. He was a chilly sort of fellow and she was a redhead, with all that goes with the temperament. She — well, it was a rape, I suppose, except that I was infatuated and big for my age — and once the final moment began, I couldn’t stop. There’s a point which, if a man lets it get that far, there is simply no stopping, and physically I was a man. It happened in her own house, too, on a rainy afternoon. I’d gone over to ask my professor a question in physics. I was doing advanced work and so I was a sort of favorite of his. I know now, of course, that he had a homosexual bent, which explained her, I suppose. But after she initiated me into the way of the flesh, so to speak, I simply became obsessed, to put it bluntly. I thought about nothing but sex. Are you shocked?”

“No,” she said quietly, “only terribly sorry for that boy.”

He did not reply to this, but continued his story, almost coldly, she thought. “It didn’t matter how many experiences I had or with whom. They all ended the same way — in a sort of disgust with the woman and with myself. I couldn’t understand why. She — whichever she happened to be — was always irresistibly attractive until I’d slept with her — maybe not at once but inevitably, and then it would be over. I’d stop seeing her then. I suppose I knew subconsciously that there was no real relationship there — a blind demand of the body, meaningless so far as communication went, like eating when you’re hungry. Anyway, slowly, I grew beyond the meaningless stage. I simply stopped. I saw that I was destroying something in myself. I was destroying the capacity to communicate on any other level than sex. As soon as I’d got to like a girl — or a woman — and that might happen instantaneously, I thought of her physically. What confuses me more is that I think of you in the same way except it is entirely different with you — it’s on every level at once.”

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.

…“I have a bone to pick with you, in fact, several bones.”

Thus he began the next day as soon as they met face to face at the breakfast table in the nearly empty dining room of the inn.

“Bone by bone, one at a time, please,” she begged, as he pushed in her chair.

She was conscious of a deep weariness this morning, for she had not slept well. Broken dreams, always ending in frustration of some sort, a wandering road she walked alone, which ended suddenly without reason, a river in which she swam, unable to reach a shore, a crying child whom she searched for and could not find — from such dreams she had waked this morning, listless and without her usual morning energy.

“First, an exception to your saying that the inventions of science outdate themselves. Mathematics never does! All mathematics, if correctly done, are true. New discoveries may demand new equations, but the mathematics remain true, if correct. There’s something eternal about mathematics. Who was it — someone — said that mathematics is the music of logical thinking and of course music is the mathematics of art?”

He sat down as he poured this forth, and she put up her hands in laughing protest.

“Wait — wait! It’s so early in the morning—”

Was this what he had been thinking about in the night while she was weaving her futile dreams?

“I’m sorry,” he said penitently. “But you’ve spoiled me, you know. I’ve grown used to simply beginning where I am, when I’m with you. I couldn’t sleep last night for some reason. I’d half a mind to wake you up, too, but it would have been too selfish of me, though I’m selfish enough, God knows, so I lay thinking about what you’d said and trying to justify myself in my choice of work by reasoning out the relationship between science and art — which this morning seems to me to be that art concerns itself with beauty and science concerns itself with reality. Perhaps we couldn’t face the harsh reality without seeing the beauty, too. We need both science and art.”

“In the same person?” she asked.

“If the person is big enough,” he said firmly. “And do you want your eggs scrambled this morning?”

“Yes, please,” she said.

…The verbal duet continued later in the day, in the unplanned give and take which she was beginning to enjoy so keenly. This slipping in and out between the ephemeral of everyday incident and eternal verities was something she had not known before. She had listened to her father and to Edwin, obedient to their age and wisdom, but keeping her thoughts and arguments to herself. Now and again during her life as a student and then a wife, she had met brilliant men at a dinner table, at an evening’s entertainment, and had even become absorbed for a time thereafter in their dominating brilliance, but she had not met a man, a young man, fearless as Jared was fearless, in his instinctive recognition of her as a woman but his equal, indeed at times his superior, which instead of an invitation he seemed to consider a delight. Such acceptance was new to her.

The morning passed in amiable conversation between long pauses of silence as he drove and she contemplated the changing landscape. It was noon, after an unusually long silence, that he suddenly spoke and the duet began again.

“I don’t understand the creative process, whether in science or art. I know the process, of course — a long time, hours or days or weeks, when I simply muddle along in a morass of confusion. My mind is like a frantic animal locked in a cage, racing this way and that, searching for a door. Then suddenly the door is there. But it wasn’t there all along. It appears without cause and without reason, and I am inspired.”

“Because you’ve been searching,” she said. “You’ve created your own inspiration because of your own demand — I suppose upon your subconscious. That’s where the mind goes for its sources. It’s the reservoir each of us has, perhaps the only one. That’s what makes great art — the artist draws upon the reservoir. Otherwise how understand abstract art? It’s successful only when it truly expresses that in the subconscious which is common to us all.”

“How is it you know so much?” he demanded.

She still refused to allow herself to speak of her age. Call it vanity, but there were ways in which she was indeed vain! She equivocated.

“I had intelligent parents,” she said.

“It’s odd, but I don’t want to know anything about your husband — or your children.”

“They wouldn’t understand you,” she said quietly.

“Then I don’t have to understand them, do I?”

“No.”

Her answer was literal. She would never try to explain the inexplicable fact of her relationship to him. She owed no one such explanation. She was alone, she was free.

…“I have been hearing the oddest gossip about you,” Amelia said the next day.

Amelia had come for one of her infrequent visits, a morning call, made usually on her way from the hairdresser in the center of the city.

“Have you indeed,” she murmured in pretended indifference.

She had reached home the night after Christmas and Jared had left her at once, as soon as he had seen her safely into the house.

“The best, the happiest Christmas I’ve ever had,” he told her.

To take her in his arms when he parted from her was now his habit, so much so indeed that she wondered if it meant anything to him, after all. Certainly it meant too much to her, for her own peace.

“I’ll be back on New Year’s Eve,” he said at the door.

She had closed it behind him and felt the house empty about her, a shell without life. She was glad to see Weston appear at the end of the hall, obviously waked out of sleep.

“If you’d told me you was coming, madame,” he murmured reproachfully, taking her bags.

“I didn’t know myself,” she said and went upstairs.

Alone in her sitting room she had not gone immediately to bed. Instead she had lit the fire, always laid ready, had sat in the easy chair before it, reliving the past days and facing herself. I shall have to come to some sort of conclusion, she thought. I cannot go on as I am. It is too difficult. I must part from him or — she could not finish. Instead, a thousand memories of him flowed over her, the changeful expressions of his vivid face, his dark eyes now musing, now questioning, his mouth, his voice, the way his hair grew upon the back of his neck, his strong firm hands. She went to bed distraught with longing and waked this morning unassuaged, to face Amelia.

“I have indeed,” Amelia said with affectionate mockery. “And not only hearing! I had a letter from Millicent out in California. She’d had a letter from Tony. Would you like to read her letter? I have it in my bag.”

“No, thank you. If Millicent wants me to know what she thinks, she will write to me herself.”

Amelia closed the handbag she had opened. “She asks me to find out what is going on, but not to trouble you or worry you. But you know me, Edith. I can’t beat around bushes — never have, especially with you.”

“So what did you reply to Millicent?” she asked, evading the bushes.

“I told her that whatever you did was your own business, but if the gossip was true, I thought you were not only lucky but damnably clever and every woman of your age would envy you. After all, Queen Victoria is dead and we’ve buried the Puritans and why should teen-agers have all the fun nowadays?"

They were sitting on the glassed porch, the sun streaming through the eastern windows. The gardener had filled the place with blooming poinsettias for Christmas and in the midst of warmth and light and color it was impossible to be anything but gay.

“Thank you, Amelia,” she said.

She met her friend’s inquisitive look with daring and determination. No, she would not tell Amelia about Jared.

“Is that all?” Amelia asked.

“That’s all,” she said.

“Then there’s no truth to the gossip?”

“There’s never truth to gossip.”

“Have it your own way, my dear,” Amelia said, getting to her feet.

“I intend to,” she said and followed her friend to the door.

…Purposely during the week she reconstructed her usual life. She sat on three boards, of each of which she was a member, she consulted with her attorney over income tax matters in relation to Arnold’s will, she bought herself a sealskin jacket and small hat to match, she opened her belated Christmas presents and wrote notes of thanks. The household moved in its usual ways, surrounding her with care and comfort, and she slept well at night, postponing decision. After all, she told herself, she had not been asked to make a decision. It was possible, perhaps, and why not, simply to go on as she was, welcoming Jared when he came to visit her, accepting this remarkable friendship as a friendship and nothing more.

In this frame of mind two days before New Year’s, she gave directions after breakfast.

“Weston, Mr. Barnow will spend the next few days here.”

“Very well, madame. Shall he be here for dinner?”

“Yes. Please tell cook to begin with fresh oysters. He is fond of them.”

“Yes, madame.”

She went into the greenhouse that opened from the dining room and cut yellow snapdragons and pink carnations which she arranged for the guest room. When this was done she stood, looking about her and imagining him here, asleep in the great old-fashioned bed, or reading in the sitting room of the guest suite. She was in a tranquil mood and at this moment she thought of him with tenderness rather than desire, although she knew that desire waited. She realized, too, his loneliness, not only that he had no family except an old uncle, but the far deeper loneliness of the superior mind, dwelling in distant regions too far beyond the minds of others for ordinary companionship. She had seen her father’s loneliness, had indeed known something of the same loneliness in herself. Few women read the books that she read, or thought such thoughts as hers. Yes, she was quite right in clinging to this friendship. They were two people who communicated, in spite of the difference in their ages. Perhaps this very difference was her protection; if so, let it never be forgotten! Upon this she put away from herself everything except her joy, surely innocent, in his return.

…“Do you mind if I bring someone with me tomorrow?”

His voice, resounding over the telephone that night, seemed to echo through her quiet sitting room. Presuming she would be up late tomorrow night to see the old year out, she had eaten her dinner alone and had then come upstairs to read an hour or so and go to bed early.

“Whom do you wish to bring?” she asked now.

It was the girl, she supposed, and she felt a pang of ridiculous jealousy.

“My uncle, Edmond Hartley,” he said. “He came home unexpectedly this morning with a queer feeling that this might be his last New Year’s Eve, though he’s only sixty-seven, but I don’t like to leave him alone. I’m all he has, you know.”

“Of course, bring him.”

She spoke cheerfully enough, but she was chilled. A stranger, probably worldly wise and discerning, someone against whom she must protect herself! She went to bed disturbed at what could only be an invasion of the privacy in which her friendship with Jared had so far been conducted. She slept fitfully through the night and woke up the next morning late and ordered her breakfast sent to her room. She made no haste over the meal and it was noon before she was dressed for the day, choosing a suit she particularly liked of clear blue wool. Outside the sky was a lowering gray and the grounds, as she saw from her windows, were a darker gray, the trees, trunks and bare limbs, black with dampness. All the more reason, then, for cheer in the house, and when she went downstairs, she lit the lamps and set a match to the logs in the fireplace in the library.

About three, Jared had said, and promptly at three she saw his small car turn into the wide space, between the stone pillars at the far end of the driveway. She had waited in the library, reading desultorily, and was surprised when his uncle was ushered into the library by Jared himself. She was surprised for he, Jared, had not prepared her for this handsome debonair man, tall and slim, his silver-white hair shining above a tanned face, a trim white beard, and bright blue eyes. He came forward with outstretched hands and she rose and felt her own hands clasped in a warm handshake.

“Ah, Mrs. Chardman,” he exclaimed. “This is an imposition, an interruption, but my nephew insisted that I must come with him or he would stay with me, disrupting your plans, which I could not and would not allow. Besides, I was curious about you.”

She recovered herself sufficiently to withdraw her hands gently. “Now I am curious about you,” she said. “But I’m sure you’ll want to go to your rooms first after so long a drive. Jared, Weston has put your uncle next to you. You’ll share the sitting room between you.”

Thus she dismissed them for the moment, with a smile and glance for Jared, and waited downstairs. Three o’clock was an awkward hour, she decided, left to herself, a space equidistant between luncheon and dinner, and the hours ahead suddenly became a burden. Three instead of two, and she could not devote herself either to Jared or his uncle! But now Jared came in alone, and stooped to lay his cheek against her hair.

“I’m leaving you to my uncle,” he said. “I’ve an appointment with an engineer. We’re to discuss something I’m making. He’s a practical sort of fellow and he’ll pick holes in my dreams.”

“Don’t let him discourage you,” she said, holding his hand and looking up at him while she spoke. “I’m not sure I like people who pick holes in dreams.”

“It will be good for me, and I’ll be back for cocktails.”

With this he put her hand to his lips and was gone, leaving her waiting and half afraid.

…“In fact,” Edmond Hartley said, a few minutes later, “had I not been curious about you, I would not have presumed to descend upon you in this fashion.” He seated himself opposite her by the blazing fire and continued. “You have had the most extraordinary effect on my nephew, Mrs. Chardman, a — a maturing effect, I suppose would be the best way to express it. From a most disarranged young man, not knowing what to choose among at least half-a-dozen possibilities as his lifework — and I do assure you he could be a shining success in any one of them — he is settling with a most interesting combination of them all, and it is something I’ve not really heard much about, but it appears to be extremely useful, a science and engineering sort of thing, which I confess I don’t at all understand but which seems to me might be extremely useful. He is so much like his mother, my sister Ariadne, and again so totally unlike, her, that I am bewildered in general, and not knowing what to do, I leave him to his own devices, and consequently, I am afraid, I have not been very helpful to him. But you seem to understand him so marvelously well, that I felt I must meet you, if only to thank you and, hopefully, to gain some of your wisdom.”

This he poured forth in a mellifluous voice, rich in emphasis, his beautiful bauds active in gesture, and his blue eyes shining, extraordinarily youthful eyes, she thought, and yet the combination conveyed a central coldness which she could not immediately fathom.

“I should like to know more about Jared’s parents,” she said quietly.

He looked at her. “You are so beautifully restful,” he said irrelevantly. “I can see why Jared says he can always talk to you. I am not such a good listener. Indeed, as he very well knows, I usually do not know what he is talking about. My own preoccupations are early French poetry and English stained glass — cathedral glass.”

“Neither of which I know anything about,” she said. “And if I have done anything for Jared, it is nothing in comparison to what he has done for me. He has given me a new interest in life, which I badly needed. His youth, his enthusiasm, his energy, his extraordinary gifts are, well, quite bewildering and certainly exciting.”

He leaned forward in his chair, his hands clasped on his knees. “My dear lady, may I ask? I’m his only living relative, you know. Are you by any chance — lovers?”

She hesitated before the sudden confrontation. Then she used the narrow dagger that Jared had so innocently plunged into her heart a few days ago.

“He does not think of me in that way,” she said quietly.

He leaned back in his chair and his hands relaxed.

“Ah, I am almost sorry to hear you say that. He is so lonely.” She wondered, watching the mobile handsome face, if she were going to dislike this man. “He told me something about a girl,” she said.

“Yes, there is one in the offing — the very far offing. He’s really not ready for marriage, I’m afraid. He’s devoted to his work, as you know, and all these ideas floating about in his own mind — I doubt he is ready to undertake any permanent relationship. I dread it, for I saw Ariadne wither under exactly the same sort of — obliviousness, shall I say? Barnow — Jared’s father — was a, well perhaps one should say he was a disorganized genius. He was highly talented, one of those brilliant men of whom in college one expects everything, but when they get into the practical world, all their talents disintegrate.

“Ariadne was mad about him. They were both mad, for that matter. She was a beautiful debutante. Our family was — well, it doesn’t matter now, but she could have married anyone and she chose Barnow. The marriage was doomed — an exquisite girl, but spoiled — oh yes, who could help spoiling her? The only daughter — there were just two of us and our parents were, well, never mind, but they were disappointed in young Barnow as a son-in-law. I suppose divorce was just ahead, but death struck first. Barnow was on his way to an exciting new job in the West somewhere and Ariadne was with him. They were driving, and probably quarreling. At any rate, they were crossing the Rockies, one of those dreadful passes, you know, still icy in early spring, and their car went over a cliff.”

“How horrible!” Her voice was a whisper.

“Horrible,” he agreed, “and I thought of suing someone, for there was no barricade, you know. But it was explained to me that it was safer not to have a barricade, you know, on those heights, where no barricade would hold on the rocks, but people might trust to it and drive at high speed, and so if there were no barricade they would realize they must be careful. But being careful was one thing Ariadne never was, nor Barnow, either. Anyway, Jared was left to me as his only relative, for my parents had died a short time before of natural causes, first my father of a cerebral something and then my mother out of sheer willfullness, I do believe, because she wouldn’t live without him, and I never forgave her for it. I adored her and I hated my powerful, domineering father, who of course hated me in return and poured out his love on Ariadne. But why am I telling you all this about the most confusing and confused family that ever lived? Oh, yes, it’s to explain Jared. So you see I’ve had to let him simply grow up in his own way, because I knew nothing of how to bring up a child.”

“You’ve never married?”

“I’ve not been so lucky,” he said abruptly.

She felt the central coldness of this man, yet not, perhaps, a basic chill so much as an absolute restraint, self-imposed in some fashion she did not as yet understand. Something was hidden in this man, be was wary in spite of his frankness.

“A tragic story,” she said, “and I am glad you told me. It will help me the better to understand Jared.”

She touched a bell near her and Weston came to the door.

“Put a log on the fire,” she directed, “and bring us cocktails in half an hour.”

She understood now why Jared was impulsive and searching everywhere for life. He had been prepared for nothing and realizing the emptiness out of which he had sprung her heart turned toward him in a fresh surge of love and compassion. She faced the ascetic figure opposite her.

“Tell me something about French poetry,” she said.

… “I don’t know,” Jared said.

She was alone with him as the clock approached midnight and the old year neared its end. An hour ago his uncle had risen to his feet.

“I never watch the end of an old year,” he told them. “At my age it is only painful. If you will excuse me, I will thank you for a pleasant evening and take my leave.”

He had bowed to her and smiled at Jared. “Good night — and sweet dreams.”

“I don’t know,” Jared now repeated. “He wanted to come. He wanted to meet you. He said I was changed and he wanted to know why. I asked him how I was changed, and he said something was crystallizing in me, whatever that means. He lives a frightfully controlled life.”

“Controlled by whom?” she asked.

“Himself. And I was wrong about his ever having a mistress. He’s never loved a woman.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes — when I told him about you.”

“What did you tell him about me?”

“That I am hopelessly in love with you. And he said that he envied me because he’d never been in love, not with a woman, that is. And suddenly I understood him completely. He’s so damnably — good. He won’t accept love on any other terms but the highest. So he doesn’t accept love at all. He’s lived alone with his books and his paintings. Even friends he keeps at a distance. Even me.”

She allowed the full tragedy of this to permeate her mind until her heart seemed physically to ache. “And do you approve of this rejection of love just because it is unorthodox?”

“Yes, I do,” he said simply. “Now that I know what love is.”

They looked steadfastly into each other’s eyes.

“And what is love?” she asked.

“I am finding out,” he said. “Someday — perhaps — I will tell you.”

The minutes had slipped away as they talked and suddenly the grandfather clock in a corner struck twelve. They waited in silence, and he reached for her hands and held them in both his own. At the twelfth stroke, he stooped and kissed her lips.

“It’s a new year,” he said. “A new year, and in it anything can happen.”

…But in the night she woke, and remembered everything that Jared had said about his uncle. In all her life only Edwin had been articulate about love and being a philosopher he had made even love a philosophy. Thinking of him, she could imagine him declaring in his gently dogmatic fashion that love had manifold forms, and none of these was to be summarily rejected. Thus remembering him, she found herself contrasting the two older men, Edwin so free in his own fashion within the limitless boundaries of his organized freedom and Edmond so controlled within his self-imposed restriction. Each in his own way proclaimed the supreme meaning of love, the one by acceptance and delight, the other by refusal and abstinence. The difference defined the nature of the two men, the one accepting and joyous in spite of age and infirmity, the other diffident, hiding himself in a mist of words, signifying — what? And Jared, how was it with him? Would love enlarge or confine him? For that matter, what would love do to her? Neither question could be answered as yet. She did not know the limits of love. She had only acknowledged love. She had declared, by such acknowledgment at least, its presence within her. The question now was what she would do with it — or more accurately, what it would do with her.

She lay in the silence of the night and the darkness until, oppressed, she put on the light by her bed and saw snowflakes piling on the sill of an open window and blowing softly upon the blue carpet of the floor. Getting up, she closed the window and brushed the snow into the brass fire shovel and thence upon the dead gray logs where the fire had died. She was about to get into bed, shivering with cold, when she heard footsteps pacing down the hall. She listened, wondering, and then put on her blue velvet dressing gown and opened her door. Edmond Hartley was at the head of the stairs about to descend, fully dressed, when he saw her.

“I am sleepless,” he said, “and I was about to go in search of a book I saw in the library today.”

“Shall I come to your help?” she asked.

“My dear lady, you are very kind.”

“In a minute,” she said, and returned to her mirror to brush her hair and pin it back, and touch her face with powder, her lips with color. Vanity, she told herself, but vain she was, even when she was alone. And leaving the room, she found him waiting at the head of the stair without the slightest sign of noticing that the blue of her robe matched the blue of her eyes, or that she was, in fact, quite beautiful. With an air of almost tolerant patience be allowed her to precede him down the stairs and into the library, where expertly he coaxed the dying coals in the fireplace into flames again, while she lit one lamp after another until the whole room glowed, the books on their shelves, the great bowl of flowers on the long mahogany table, the ruby red in the pattern of the Oriental rugs, the polished floor.

“Why are you sleepless?” she asked, seating herself by the fire.

He was searching a bookshelf now, his back to her.

“I am not a good sleeper at best,” he replied absently, “and in a strange house — ah, here’s the book I was looking for, a rare edition of Mallarme.”

“It belonged to my father,” she said.

“But he was a scientist—”

She broke in, “He was everything.”

“Ah, like Jared.”

He sat down in a large armchair opposite her and opened the book. Then, not looking at her, he went on, “I’ve been the worst possible person to bring up a lively brilliant boy. I haven’t dared to let myself love him — fearing myself, lest I love him too much — a poisonous love.”

“Can love be poisonous?” she asked.

He darted a strange sidewise look at her and closed the book. “Ah, yes, indeed it can. I learned that very early. I might say I was — conditioned to it when I was very young — by an older man.”

His lips seemed suddenly dry, and he ran his tongue over them. “I never thought I could ever tell that to anyone. But I want you to — to — know why I have never allowed Jared — to come close to me.”

He lifted his somber eyes and in them she saw a desperate pleading to be understood.

“I understand,” she said gently. “I do understand. And I think it most noble of you to — to use such restraint, such control, such reverence for true love. I respect you very much.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you. I–I don’t know if I have ever been spoken to like that before. But I have never wanted to do anything — or seem to do anything — that would warp the — the meaning of love for Jared. It was better, I thought, to let him grow up without any expression of the love I truly feel for him rather than shape a false image of love. The image of love is so easily warped — misshaped — perverted somehow, so that never again does it appear what it is, the only reason for living, the only refuge, the only source of energy and soul’s growth. The very power of love — the most powerful force in life — makes love produce, when it is warped, or perverted, or even misplaced, the greatest suffering in life.”

He spoke so sincerely, so deeply, that she saw him anew, a man of profound and agonized feeling, and she was silent before him.

“Teach him, my dear,” he urged. “Teach him what love is. Only a woman can do that — a woman like you.”

“I will try,” she said.

…“I want you to come to New York and see how the hand is working,” Jared said over the telephone.

She was at her desk in the library one fine spring morning, the rhododendrons outside the window already showing shades of rose and magenta as she could see. The forsythias at the far end of the lawn were in their final golden bloom, their dying brilliance gleaming against the darkness of the flanking evergreens.

“And why must I come to New York?” she asked. “You know I don’t love that city.”

“I know, but it’s really wonderful to see how the hand is working, so well that the man is going home shortly. Besides, it will give you a reason to see my people.”

She knew by now, of course, that when he said “my people,” he meant the people who needed the instruments he designed to take the place of the hands and feet, the eyes, hearts, kidneys they might lose or had lost. She had scarcely seen him in the months since he and his uncle had spent the New Year with her, but his long telephone calls, made usually at midnight, and of late his short, dramatic letters, had kept him close to her. And she? It seemed that she had done nothing except play the grand piano in the music, room, attend a few committee meetings and dinners and concerts, and wait until he called or wrote. She no longer hid from herself the fact that he absorbed her entire inner life and thought, so that whatever she did was of no real importance in comparison with the necessity of being there in the house when he called. Let him find her always there, ready for his every need! When he wrote, she sent her immediate, answering letter, and in this communication, at once remote and intimate, they began to use endearments that might have lit a flame had they been in each other’s presence. Upon a page, in black ink, even the words “my dearest” remained cool.

“This is Tuesday,” he was saying. “Can you make it tomorrow? Then we will have dinner together — maybe dance somewhere? We’ve never done that. Odd, I never thought of it. There’s always so much to talk about when I am with you. About three? I’ll meet you at the rehabilitation center — you have the address.”

“Tomorrow at three,” she promised.

And how absurd, she thought, five minutes later, the call ended, that she was already thinking of what she should wear! She decided on a pale gray suit with a matching coat, very thin and gracefully cut and fitting her beautifully, with hat, shoes and bag of the same silvery shade, and this gray a foil for her apple-green jade jewelry which Arnold had bought for her in Hong Kong on their last journey around the world. Thus arrayed, she left the house the next day after luncheon, the chauffeur smart in a new black uniform. Though she was accustomed to the luxuries of her life, she felt today a peculiar happiness, as though she were young again, as though she were going to meet the lover she had never had. She put from her mind every small annoyance of her life and drifted away into a mood of total happiness. For hours she would be with Jared, whom now she knew she loved as she had never loved anyone before, so that she felt herself changed and glorified by love. Do what she might, how could she hide from him the truth? But why indeed must truth be hidden?

…“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jared demanded proudly.

They stood in a large rectangular room, bare of decoration but bright with the afternoon sun streaming through the uncurtained windows. Around the wails were narrow hospital beds, each occupied by men with varied amputations. There was not a whole man among them, she saw as she glanced about her. Only Jared was perfect, cruelly perfect, she thought, and it was to the credit of those pallid men, lying or sitting, that there was no hatred on their drawn faces.

What Jared called “beautiful” was in fact the most hideous object she had ever seen, a two-fingered instrument on a metal arm and coated with a rubbery surface the color of human flesh.

“Let me see how it works,” she countered.

“Show her,” Jared commanded.

The man, very young, to whom the instrument was attached somewhere under his shirt, obeyed. The two fingers moved, separately and together, like thumb and forefinger.

“Now take her hand,” Jared told him.

She controlled the instant desire to step back out of reach and instead let her hand be clasped gently by the two rubbery fingers.

“Can you feel her hand, how soft it is, how smooth?” Jared asked eagerly.

“Sure I can feel,” the man said, and let his right eyelid drop in a mischievous wink.

She laughed and instantly every man in the room was laughing and now she did not mind at all the touch of the rubbery fingers, the forefinger stroking the palm of her hand.

“That’s enough,” Jared said. “You needn’t carry even a good thing to an extreme.”

He was laughing, too, as he spoke, but she could see he was proud.

“You have every right to be proud,” she said, gently withdrawing her hand.

“Thanks — I’m happy, myself,” he replied. “This fellow — he lost his right arm in Danang, didn't you, Bill?”

“Danang it was, sir. I picked up what looked like a bunch of bananas and suddenly they went off — bang!”

Jared clapped his left shoulder.

“Well, what we’ve done together will help a lot of other men, too. Just remember that, will you?”

“Sure will,” the man said.

They moved away then, she and Jared, away from the wounded, and in the corridor she sighed, forgetting for the moment everything except the drawn face, the skeleton-thin body of the man with the hand,

“He’s so piteously young, Jared,” she said.

“Not yet twenty-one,” he agreed, “and I don’t know a greater joy in life than to see that substitute hand working.”

Absorbed in common joy, they forgot each other.

“How much does he really feel?” she asked, “and how much does his imagination supply?”

“Well, darling,” Jared said with a wry smile, “I daresay he’s felt many a soft hand in reality, and memory helps imagination, I’m sure — and eyesight, of course. Your hand looks soft, you know! But some of it’s real — the pressure of a pliant material against warm flesh. Ah, yes, a good deal of it is real, enough to convey pleasure, at any rate.”

What a loss, she thought, that the word of endearment he had seemed to use unconsciously had been so often carelessly used that now it was meaningless! Was it not meaningless? But he had never used it before. She stilled the sudden beat of her heart and spoke softly.

“I hope he will meet a girl someday very soon, who will be able to know what the hand you made for him can feel. Then she will think it is beautiful, too.”

“I hope so,” he said gravely.

He stopped at a door and took a key from his pocket and fitted it to the lock. “This is my laboratory. Remember I told you I wanted to work on the stethoscope? Well, I’m doing it.”

He opened the door and they went in. It was a fairly large room, crowded with machinery of a delicate sort, and at one end, under the windows stood a long worktable with a chromium top. Upon it was a complex piece of machinery.

“I don’t understand any of it,” she told him.

“It’s a method of testing stethoscopes,” he explained. “Very important, you know, that a stethoscope observes accurately and reports intelligibly. It must not have what it hears distorted by some sort of vibrating sound, for example. For this I’ve designed a monitory microphone — this thing here — but then the listening ear must hear properly, too. I’ve designed this artificial ear — doesn’t look much like an ear, does it? But it hears — that is, with a system like this — how much, actually, does the ear hear? How far? How clearly? But I had to check even this artificial ear with another one made of different material, and of course everything has to be checked again and again. I use recordings of the human chest wall — the heart, breathing, and so on—”

She listened, following knowledgeably enough now what he was saying, but while her brain comprehended, some other and more subtle part of her being was tensely aware of his physical nearness, his hands moving about the machinery as he demonstrated its functioning, his voice music to her ear, his profile, clear-cut against the gray walls, his whole dynamic being absorbed in what he was saying. A wave of joy swept through her being. She felt alive as she had never felt in her life before, even in her youth. They were together and bright hours lay ahead.

…Hours later she was in his arms. They were dancing between courses at their dinner in a famous restaurant, an after-theater place which would not be crowded until nearly midnight. They had come early, but the orchestra was already playing a slow waltz.

“I am glad,” she said. “I can’t do the new dances. I can’t dance alone.”

“And who wants to dance alone?” he retorted.

The owner-manager came up and greeted Jared by name.

“He’s my uncle’s friend,” Jared explained.

“I like your uncle,” she said.

Idle talk, but tonight she must speak only idly. They were too near the edge of something unknown, a further step toward each other, which she did not know that she wanted to take, or even whether she could stop if it began.

“Why do you tell me now that you like my uncle?” Jared demanded as they took their seats.

“I don’t know, I just remember him. Perhaps I feel sorry for him.”

“He’s quite happy,” Jared said.

He was restless, she perceived, and she did not tell him that she remembered his uncle because she pitied him, unable as he was to feel such joy as hers.

“Let’s dance,” Jared said restlessly.

He rose and led her to the dance floor. It had been a long time since she had danced, for Arnold had not enjoyed dancing and since his death she had not gone out. Now under Jared’s superb leading she responded with all her old delight enlivened by the pleasure of new love.

“You dance beautifully,” he said.

He laid his cheek gently against her hair and she yielded herself to him while she held back the words of love which waited, impatient to be spoken. Around them a few couples began to gather, but in the dim light she recognized no one and was not recognized, except that a man spoke in passing, a young blonde girl in his arms.

“Beautiful partner you have there, Jared.”

“Thank you, Tim,” he said coldly, and swept her away. “I wish you wouldn’t make older men envy me,” he grumbled in mock annoyance.

She laughed. “But he is with a very pretty girl.”

“Who wants just a pretty girl?” he retorted. “Besides, I didn’t see her. I see only you.”

The spell of the evening held. They sat down to a new course at the table and were silent except for a desultory few words and then he was on his feet again, inviting her, and together they returned to the communion of the dance, he pressing her to him, she yielding to his every movement. Dangerous, she told herself, dangerous but unutterably sweet. Let no word be spoken, let the communication be only this languorous delight of being close together, joined by the rhythm of music and movement. She grew afraid at last of herself, and of him. An inner wisdom restrained her. The spell must be broken now, before it was too late, now before, overcome by her own desire, she let herself be led away into some solitude when, alone with him, she could ho longer control her own longing. It was near midnight and the theater crowd began to fill the room.

“I must go home,” she said as a dance ended and the orchestra retired for a brief rest.

He drew himself from her reluctantly, still holding her hand in his. “Why must you?”

“What else?” she replied. “Of course I must go home.”

He fell silent then, very silent. He paid the check and put her in her car, waiting at the door. He was so silent, his face was so grave as he looked at her in the dimness of the street, that she wondered if inadvertently she had hurt him. His eyes were troubled, or so she imagined, as he lingered after she was seated in the car.

“Good night,” she said. “I’ve had a wonderfully happy evening.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “Wasn’t it selfish of me to keep you entirely to myself?”

“It was where I wanted to be,” she replied.

Their eyes met in a long, steadfast interchange, a communication. Sooner or later, she told herself, it must be spoken in words.

…She woke the next morning in a mood of resolution. The day in New York had been a double revelation. She saw Jared a man at work, she saw herself a woman in love. What had these two to do with each other, if anything? Surely something, she argued with herself. Surely love had a meaning, a purpose, but for her — what? Even before she rose from her bed, even when she had just awakened, the birds in the English ivy clinging to the walls outside the open windows of her room having roused her by their twittering and merriment, she found herself facing the questions hidden in her mind. She lay for a few minutes, her eyes closed. She must pause, she told herself, she must take thought of what she was to do with herself — and with Jared. The time of mourning for Arnold, even for Edwin, was over. Another spring had come, another love, a new life was about to begin. But what was that life to be? It was still within her power to decide, although such was her obsession with Jared that it might not be within her power if she met him again, unfortified by decision. She was dismayed to realize her own weakness. I am capable of anything, she thought in shocked dismay. I am entirely capable of seducing him. That is what I am afraid I might do! If we are alone together somewhere, some evening, even here in this house, I could do it. And he would not resist. He has passed the point of resistance. He is beginning to think of me in that way.

She was aware of a double self in this thinking. One self delighted in the possibility of seduction, oh, yes, of course a seduction so skillfully brought about that he would appear the aggressor and she the one who yielded. The other self? At this moment that one appeared as vague, as wavering as a ghost. The morning sun shone too warmly into the luxurious bedroom, the bed was too soft, her body too ready with healthy desire. She could only remember last night when, pressed to him, they had moved as one through the slow steps of the dance. For a moment she submitted to desire, then unable to endure her loneliness, she threw back the covers and got out of bed.

This daily ritual, this tending of the flesh! She stood before the mirror and twisted her long loose hair about her head and pinned it, ready for her morning shower. Then she leaned forward and examined her image. She was still beautiful in the morning, but would he ever see her so? Without makeup, she still had color, her lips softly red, a mild flush on her cheeks, her eyes blue under her lightly marked brows. She had good eyes, people always noticed her eyes, and seeing herself, she seemed to see another woman, a woman awakened to new life of some sort, the cool exterior changed, the poise gone, a tremulous, questioning, shy woman, puzzled, perhaps, or not quite daring enough. It was she, and facing herself, she was afraid again. She moved away from the image and made haste to return to the routine of bath and dress, of breakfast served as usual at the small table set for her alone in the bay window of the dining room, and Weston, waiting on her in grave silence while she drank orange juice and ate her usual meal, boiled egg and bacon and a slice of wheaten bread, without butter.

“Cook asks if you would like sweetbreads for luncheon, madame,” Weston said when she rose.

“Very nice,” she murmured, not caring, and she went away to her desk in the library and drew from a pigeonhole the plans for the house by the sea, a house that might someday be built, or might not. How could she know? Everything depended on the woman who would live in it, alone or not alone.

She spent the morning over the plans, finishing them to the last detail of door and window. Then, since the day continued fine, she ordered her luncheon served on the terrace and there in the shelter of the tall evergreens which hid her even from Amelia’s sharp eyes next door, she sat in quiet thought while she ate, pausing now and then to toss a bit of bread to a squirrel gazing at her with sharp black eyes. When she had finished a slice of melon for dessert she rose and having made up her mind, she gave her orders.

“Weston, please have the chauffeur bring the car in half an hour. I am going to Red Hills, in Jersey,”

“Yes, madame,” he said.

…By the sea, the air was still cool. She had left chauffeur and car at the road and had walked across the dunes to the top of the cliff where the gray rock began. Here she seated herself upon a weathered log, a twisted pine which a storm had once uprooted and left. The sea was moving in mild waves, rippling into edges of white under the blue sky. The sea was blue over green depths here at the shore but deepening to purple on the horizon. Now here she was alone, and let her savor her loneliness, plumb it to its depth, its bottomless depth. For this was the evil of loving a man as she knew she now loved Jared. Love made the lover lonely without the beloved, an eternal loneliness which nothing could mend until the beloved was here again. She shrank from any other presence. How long had it been since she had sought out her old friends? Even Amelia she had not seen for weeks. She had refused all invitations, she had answered telephone calls with impatience, she had immured herself in her own obsession of love. But last night had forced her to realization. She could not continue as she was. Yet to what was she now to move for change? A question without answer!

She sighed and rose to her feet. Suddenly she wanted to descend from this height. This was too lonely a spot, poised between sky and sea. She would descend from it. She would go down the rickety steps and lie on the white sand of the beach below. Peering over the edge of the cliff, she saw a small cave under the overhanging rock. The tide was out, and the sand lay dry and warm, doubtless, from the sun. There she would hide herself, there she would escape. She glanced at the car on the road. The chauffeur was asleep behind the wheel, his cap slipping from his head and his mouth ajar. Even he would not see where she was going.

She went down the steps, clinging to the shaky rail, and stepped into the soft white sand. The cave was raised a few inches above the beach and she went to it, a place sheltered from the wind. She took off her coat and folded it into a pillow and lay down on the sand warmed by the sun. The overhanging rock made only enough shade to protect her head and shoulders, but the air was cool so that the warmth of the sun on her body was pleasant. She sighed and relaxed and felt calmed and hidden. An hour of rest would do her good. She had slept fitfully last night, had waked often. Before she was aware, she escaped now into deep sleep, soothed by the lap-lap-lapping of the waves.

…And was suddenly awakened by hearing her name called again and again.

“Edith — Edith — Edith!”

She opened her eyes slowly and stared up at the overhanging rock and could not imagine where she was.

“Edith — Edith!”

She sat up and shook the sand out of her hair. Her feet were wet, they were in water. And it was Jared’s voice shouting at her. He was racing down the steps.

“The tide has turned, you darling idiot! I couldn’t see you until you moved. Oh, how could you! How did you get here all alone? Where’s your car?”

He was rolling up his trousers and preparing to wade to her.

“Take off your shoes and stockings,” he commanded. “The water is only about to your knees, but a few more minutes — lucky it’s a calm day! But the tide is rolling in, the cave would have filled—”

She was peeling off her stockings and now, shoes in her hand, she began to walk through the water toward him. He met her before she had reached halfway, and, his arm about her, he led her to the steps.

“Up with you as fast as possible,” he scolded. “No, I’ll wait until you reach the top. These steps won’t bear the weight of both of us, and I don’t care to scale the cliff.”

He waited, the incoming tide swelling about him, until she had reached the top and stood upon firm ground. Then he swung himself up the steps, socks and shoes in hand, and faced her. He was pale and angry.

“You might have been caught there,” he shouted.

“I can swim,” she said mildly and sitting on a rock she began to put on her stockings while he watched her, still angry.

“I went to your house,” he said. “Weston told me where you were. Where is that damned chauffeur of yours?”

“He’s probably wondering where I am and has gone to report me lost or something.”

“You have very pretty legs and feet,” he said suddenly as though he had not heard her.

“I’ve been told that before,” she said. Then, clothed, she rearranged her hair. “I lost my hat,” she continued.

“What’s a hat—” he grumbled.

“Nothing, under the circumstances,” she agreed, “especially as it’s gone. The tide carried it away.”

They were interrupted by the return of her car and with it a police car.

“She’s come back,” the chauffeur shouted to the policeman. The two cars pulled up, and the officer stepped out and came toward them.

“I’m sorry,” she told him with her best smile. “I was stupid and fell asleep on the beach. My friend, Mr. Barnow, came along and rescued me.”

“Before she drowned,” Jared put in.

“Before I drowned,” she repeated.

The officer turned to the chauffeur. “You might have looked over the cliff!”

“I never took thought,” the chauffeur said.

Jared lost patience suddenly. “While you two decide what should have been done, I will drive Mrs. Chardman home in my car. Come along, Mrs. Chardman.”

She rose in a mood of strange peace and followed him and they drove away, together.

…“Why don't you ask me why I came?” Jared asked.

They had maintained a long silence during an early dinner at a wayside inn, a silence she had not wished to break. Indeed, she had nothing to say. The warmth of the sun, now near setting, the mild air, flowing in through the open window, the sea air, fragrant and moist, the happiness of being with him, whatever the reason, induced a profound contentment.

“Why did you come?” she asked, almost idly.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I had to — I couldn’t do anything else — properly, that is. You’ve upset me. I can’t do my work — since last night. I do nothing but think about you, how you look, the sound of your voice, the way you walk. You dance better than anyone I’ve ever known — more gracefully. I can’t tell you — it’s a yielding sort of grace. I can’t forget it. I’ve never felt like this before. Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“What can I say? Except that I’m happy, wonderfully happy. I–I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy before in my life — not in this way.” Her voice drifted off in a whisper.

“In what way?” he demanded.

“If I knew, I would tell you,” she said simply.

They were silent again after that. In the car the miles sped by. What he was thinking she did not know, his handsome profile stern and set, his eyes ahead on the road. But she did not know, either, what she herself was thinking. Perhaps it was not even thought, only feeling.

It was long after sunset, the darkness falling, when at last he pulled up in front of her house. Weston, hovering near the door, opened it when he heard the car.

“I didn’t know what to do about dinner, madame, not hearing from you.”

“We’ve dined,” she said, “and Mr. Barnow will be staying the night — at least, I suppose so?”

She turned to Jared and he nodded.

“If you will have me—”

“Of course.”

She turned to Weston. “You might bring us coffee and liqueurs in the library. I’ll just go up and change.”

She went upstairs exultant and afraid. Whatever was to happen would happen. She could not stay the inevitable, though she did not know what it was. She would yield, she would yield. Whatever he offered, she would take; whatever the cost, she would pay. Then upon an impulse she did not understand, she made no effort to look younger than she was. She twisted her hair carelessly upon her head, she put no makeup on her face, the sun and sea air had burned her fair skin and she let it be. She chose an old green frock and slipped it over her head and did not pause to look in the mirror. This was she, this flushed, sunburned woman with careless hair and bare feet thrust into silver sandals. She was forty-three years old and let him see her as such a woman. If he drew back, then it was her fate. But if he did not draw back? She refused the possibility. Why plan that which she could not know? She had a perverse instinct, lasting no more than a moment, when she wished that he would reject her and thus take from her the necessity for decision. She hesitated at the door, then opened it and went downstairs.

…He was waiting for her in the library. At the door she had hesitated again, longing and yet in dread. Then she opened it gently and only a little, but he was watching. He came swiftly across the room, he shut the door and standing with his back to it he took her in his arms and kissed her impetuously again and again.

“When I think what might have happened,” he muttered.

She stood within his embrace, yielding to it, accepting, her whole body responding. Then, after a moment, she drew back. “I wasn’t meant to die, it seems.”

“Not if I could prevent it.”

They moved hand in hand toward a sofa before which Weston had placed a small table with the liqueurs and coffee. She poured coffee, her hands shaking slightly, which he observed. “You are trembling,” he said.

“I suppose it’s something of a shock,” she said.

“I’m certainly shaken.” He tasted neither coffee nor liqueur. Instead he began abrupt talk.

“I must tell you — I’m completely confused. I’m facing an entirely new situation. I’m committed to you. I’m not a free man any more. I’ve never committed myself in my life before. I’ve never been possessed. But now I am. I’m not even sure I like it. What does a man do when he’s possessed by a woman? I only know I’d marry you tonight — if I could!”

She listened, her eyes fixed upon him. He was not thinking of her, and she realized it. He was thinking of himself, caught in a web of desire for her, resenting her because he was beginning to know how deeply he loved her. He wanted her physically and was horrified at himself. Yet if she put out her hand, if she touched him, she could have him. If she smoothed the back of his head, if she laid her hand in the curve of his arm, if she so much as looked at the slimness of waist and thigh, she could have him. She held her eyes steadfastly downcast, she refused her own desire and for reasons she did not understand except that they had nothing to do with her, but only with him, she began almost incoherently to speak out of some part of herself which, although she did not understand, she wanted him to know.

“Yesterday was such a wonderful day, Jared! I saw you as I hadn’t seen you before. And I thought I knew you! We’ve really been together a good deal, haven’t we? And yet it took yesterday, and seeing you with that amputee, to show me what you really are — a scientist, yes, and much more — a man brilliant but compassionate, strong but gentle. I love you — of course I love you — how can I help it? But it was only yesterday that made me know I love you. I shall always love you. I’m so grateful that I do. Once long ago — or it seems very long ago — a dear old man, a very great man he was, too, loved me. And he paid me a high honor. He told me that his love for me kept him alive — not only living but alive, so that his brain could stay clear and he could do his work. That, he taught me, was the great service of love — that it gives life to the lover as well as to the beloved. I’ve never forgotten what he taught me — about love.” She was silent for a moment. Then she repeated softly what Edwin once had said. “Love keeps me not only living but alive.”

He got up and walked to the tall windows and stared moodily into the shadowy gardens. A young moon rose over the pointed evergreens at the far end.

She continued, as though she talked to herself.

“I’m old enough to know that your loving me is — a miracle. I don’t understand it — I can only accept it and be grateful for it. It makes my own life beautiful. It makes me want to be useful to you in any way I can. I want to pour my life into yours, so that you’ll be all you dream of being — do all you dream of doing — which you would be and do without me, of course, but perhaps my loving you, as I do, will bring you more belief in yourself than you might have had alone — I mean, without me at this moment of your life, for of course there will be many others, many people, certainly one above all—”

She broke off lest she weep. Instead she smiled at him. She lifted the small glass of benedictine and took one sip and put it down again. The words had poured forth, from what source in her being she did not know, nor did she know why she had thought of Edwin. But she was herself again, her true self, and this, too, she must wait to understand, and be content to wait.

He came back to her slowly, pausing on his way to look at a bookshelf, to examine a painting on the wall. Then he returned to her side.

“Tell me,” he said. “Why was yesterday so important?”

“Because I saw the man you are meant to be,” she told him. “And I will do nothing to prevent that man.”

…When she was alone again, when she was upstairs in her own room, she felt dazed and yet at rest. She did not know how the words had been spoken, but they had come from a hidden part of her being. Yet now, as she recalled the moments, she realized that for a brief instant as though in a vision, she had seen side by side the man he had been only yesterday, the assured absorbed man, knowing what his work was and doing it well and finding content therein, and the man he had been today, distraught, bewildered, overwhelmed by discovering that he loved her. These two men, both of which he was, had drawn from her the words she had not known were in her, yet they were waiting to be spoken, and spoken they shaped the decision she had not known how to make. Between the two she must choose and she had chosen.

They had parted almost immediately, aware of a mutual exhaustion, and though at her bedroom door he had taken her in his arms again and kissed her, which kiss she had returned, it had been gently done, both in the giving and taking, and she knew that tonight she would open no door between them, nor would he. What she had now to do was to determine what was her place in his life. For she would love him forever. That she knew. So, knowing, what was the fulfillment of supreme love? What could it be except the fulfillment of the beloved?

She slept well that night, her inner tension released, and woke to find herself calm and rested. She lay for a while, watching the rays of the morning sun fall across the floor through the windows opening to the eastern sky. She had no sense of haste, the urgency in her was gone, and when at last she rose and made herself ready for the day, she was instinctively not surprised that Weston stood at the foot of the stairs.

“Mr. Barnow went away early this morning, madame. He left this note for you.”

“I hope you gave him his breakfast,” she said, with a serenity that surprised her.

“He would only have coffee, madame,” Weston replied, and led the way to the breakfast room.

She followed, but not directly, pausing to go out on the terrace and breathe deeply of the fragrant morning air. The locust trees were in bloom and their fragrance had attracted the bees. Long ago, when she was a child, her father had ordered hives to be set in the far end of the garden on the theory that honey was the most healthy sweet for children and then had planted young locust trees, now grown to these giants, their rugged trunks black under the branches heavy with white blossoms. Out of tender memory she had kept the hives and each autumn the gardener removed boxes of clear white honey, still fragrant with the scent of locust.

She stood for a few minutes, looking down the aisle of trees, at the far end of which was the pool and in the pool the white marble statue of the woman standing on a rock. The scene, so familiar to her that she seldom saw it, was today as freshly beautiful as though she had been away to some far place and only now had come home again. Peace pervaded her, an inner peace which enabled her to contemplate her surroundings, yes, and even her life, with new appreciation. She had made her choice and it was a right choice and she was at peace with herself.

Alone at the breakfast table and facing the southern windows, she saw the grape arbors in full leaf, the gardener was there with a stepladder and he was trimming the vines so that the strength of the vines might produce a richer fruit. Alone, she wondered that she was not lonely. She had been so often restless without Jared. When he was not with her she listened for the telephone, she listened for the opening of a door, the sound of a voice. His habit of appearing without telling her that he was coming was exasperating but exciting and kept her tense. Yet she had never said “Let me know,” for she valued his sudden need of her and his impulse to go at once to find her. When a difficulty arose in his laboratory, a technical problem or a disagreement with his superior, his recourse was to come to her and talk, until in talking he found solution, his own solution at that, for what she might say seemed to her of no importance. His lucid mind could provide its own solutions. And all this while she was holding in her hand the envelope he had left with Weston to give to her. She tore it open and drew out the single sheet it contained.

Dearest:

From now on that is what you are to me. No matter who else comes — or goes — that one word is what you are, and will always be, to me. No change is possible. Why you said what you said yesterday, why you did what you did, I do not ask, because, whatever the reason, it was right. I know.

I am yours always,

Jared

She folded the sheet and put it back in the envelope. When she went to her sitting room she would lock it in her desk to keep and to read again and again. Their love was established in the only way it could be established. She need never again wait or listen for his coming. She understood why he had left her today and she knew that he would always come back. She had made it possible for him to return to his work. She had given him his freedom even from love, and so he would love her forever. Thus musing, and smiling to herself, she ate her breakfast and thought of him with peace. Only of him she thought as she went about her day. With no planning for the future she thought of him and felt alive and strong and well.

…At the beginning of May, when the pink and white dogwoods were in bloom, the season that year being somewhat late, she had a telephone call from a girl. She knew at once it was a girl for the voice that came singing over the wire was the freshest, most youthful voice she had ever heard and she knew she had not heard it before.

“Mrs. Chardman?” the voice inquired.

“It is I,” she replied.

“Yes, well, I don’t know how to begin, but I am June Blaine. You don’t know me but I know Jared Barnow. I’m his friend — sort of!”

“Yes?”

“Yes! And I want most awfully to talk with you.”

“About him?”

“Yes, about him.”

“Does he know?”

“I told him I was calling you today.”

“And?”

“He said you would understand his point of view so it would be all right. He says you’re the only person who really knows him. That’s what he thinks! But I know him, too.”

She was silent for a few seconds when the voice stopped speaking. Then she said quietly, “Very well. When?”

“This afternoon?” the pretty voice inquired.

“At four o’clock,” she said.

“Oh, thanks!”

The telephone clicked, the voice was gone. She considered a moment and then dialed the laboratory. At eleven o’clock in the morning Jared would be there. His voice answered almost immediately.

“Jared Barnow.”

“It is I,” she said. “A girl just called. She wants to see me. This afternoon.”

“That’s June,” he said quickly. “We were playing tennis last week at her place and she wanted to know if she could see you. I said why not. Don’t take her seriously, darling. She wants to marry me and she hasn’t a chance. I’m too preoccupied!”

She laughed. “Go back to your work, then! By the way, I’ve been reading a fascinating article on silicone rubber implants for replacing arthritic or destroyed joints in human hands.”

“I saw that. Heat — molded implants — wonderful.”

“Yes, well, I won’t keep you.”

“I’ll call you tonight.”

He called her every night now at midnight when he ended his day. If he waked her, as sometimes he did, she never let him know. If he called her, it meant he needed her.

“Do call me,” she said now, and put up the receiver.

…She was not restless while she waited for four o’clock, but she was stone silent. She did not try to busy herself. Instead she lay in a long chair on the terrace, submitting herself, her eyes closed, her body motionless. Clouds drifted over the blue sky, great billows of white, and she felt the chill of shadows as they passed, and then between them was the warmth of the sun. A cool mild wind rippled over the trees and passed, leaving a motionless quiet behind. Sometimes she was almost asleep but never quite. When Weston asked where she would have her luncheon, she said, “Bring it to me here, please.” And when he had brought it she left it half eaten.

Once or twice, perhaps more, she got to her feet and walked about the lawns. The thick growth of late spring shielded her from everyone, even from Amelia, whom she had not seen in weeks. But she always returned to the long chair and lay down, waiting, while the sun rose to its zenith and passing, moved westward.

And then promptly at four o’clock she heard the sound of a car driven to the entrance on the other side of the house, and the doorbell rang and she knew she had been waiting all day for this moment. She did not move, but continued to lie waiting, her eyes still closed, for the sound of footsteps, Weston's soft shuffling and the clip clip of a girl’s heels.

“Miss Blaine has arrived, madame,” Weston said.

She opened her eyes. There the girl stood, a tall slim creature in a very short white dress, a girl with green eyes and tawny hair hanging shining and straight to her shoulders, a girl with a clean, well-bred look but one with a stubborn mouth, unsmiling. She pulled off her short white gloves and put out her right hand and spoke in a decided but pleasant, rather light voice.

“Please don’t get up, Mrs. Chardman.”

“I wasn’t going to, June, is it? I’m lazy today.”

“Yes, it’s June. For the obvious reason that I was born in June. I’ll be twenty-one next month.”

“Draw up a chair and sit down, June.”

“Thank you.”

She drew up a chair and sat down, her back to the garden and facing the graceful woman in the long chair.

“You’re younger than I thought, Mrs. Chardman.”

“Oh, no — I’m as old as you think I am. Didn’t Jared ever tell you how old I am?”

“No. He always talks of you as if you were his age.”

“That’s kind of him.”

A pause, and the girl’s eyes were on her face, she could feel the steady gaze as she continued to look down the long vista of the gardens. Then she made an effort and met the watching eyes.

“Tell me about yourself, June — why you want to see me, anything you like, tell me.”

The girl’s voice was casual, deliberate, clear. “I’ll come straight to the point. I want to see the sort of woman Jared likes. I want to know if you are anything like me. Or must I — sort of — recondition him to another woman — like me.”

She laughed. “Is that what you think you can do, June?”

“I’ll try, if I must!”

“In other words, you’re determined to — marry him?”

“If I can.”

“Do you think you can?”

“Yes.”

The girl’s voice was quite calm, quite firm.

“Then there’s nothing more to be said, is there, June?”

“Yes, because I want him to love me first.”

“And do you think he can be taught to love you?”

“I will teach him, as soon as I know how. That’s why I’ve come to you. You’ve done it. He loves you. But of course he can’t marry you. You’re too old. Still, he’ll have to marry someone. I want to be that someone. That’s why I’m here.”

She was amazed, amused, wounded and even somewhat angry. An instinct of self-defense and perversity compelled her, almost, to defy the girl, to say carelessly with a laugh if she could muster laughter, that she might just marry Jared herself. It had been thought of!

“Did Jared say I am too old to marry him?”

“He’s never mentioned marriage to me. I don’t believe he’s thought of marrying anyone. I’ll be the first one.”

This was said with such self-confidence that again she wanted to laugh and could not. And of course the girl was right. She was too old to marry Jared. Women nowadays did often marry men much younger than themselves, but there was something repulsive in the idea. Love — but not marriage! One couldn’t help loving a certain human being, and it might have nothing to do with marriage. Edwin had taught her that.

“Please teach me,” the girl said.

“Do you love Jared?” she asked.

“Of course,” the girl said. “Else why would I bother myself about him?”

“What is it you love about him?”

“Everything,” the girl said.

“Define everything, please!”

“Well — just everything. The way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks — it’s just a sort of magic.”

“It’s not everything. It’s only the outside of him.”

“Well, that’s enough for me.”

“Ah, but is it enough for him?”

The girl looked at her stubbornly, her green eyes unwavering. “It’s enough to begin on.”

She returned the girl’s gaze. “Perhaps it is,” she said. And then after a moment she said, “How can I know why Jared loves me? Why don’t you ask him? Certainly it’s not because of the way I walk — or talk — or even because of some sort of magic — which I don’t have, I’m sure. I can’t help you, June. I don’t know how.”

She wanted suddenly to be rid of this girl. She was angry with her — the absurdity of such a visit, the insolence of the intrusion! Young people nowadays thought only of themselves. Yes, she was too old, too old for Jared, too old for this girl.

She rose and walked toward the door. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, my dear. I really don’t know what you’re talking about. You and Jared must settle your own relationship. Now come in. and have a cup of tea with me. Or would you rather have something to drink?”

…It was dusk when the girl left. Hours had passed and she had let them pass, had helped them to pass, because she had reluctantly begun to like this girl. There had been nothing new in her story, for she told it without being asked. Divorced parents, she an only child, about to graduate from a girls’ college.

“I try to be fair to both my parents, Mrs. Chardman, but I live in my father’s house because my mother has married again and I don’t like my stepfather. He’s younger than my mother and sometimes — well, I don’t like to be where he is, because I don’t want my mother to be hurt — not by me, and certainly not by him because she’s terribly in love with him. It’s so pitiful, isn’t it?”

“Where did you meet Jared?” she had asked the girl.

“When we were skiing three years ago. I love to ski. Usually I spend Christmas holidays skiing. Now we play tennis. It was so surprising to find he lives in New York and I live in Scarsdale, you know. He comes to our place on Saturdays sometimes, unless he calls up that he wants to work. My father and he are good friends. My father says he’s the most brilliant young man he’s ever known.”

“What does your father do?”

“He’s a banker in New York. He has an apartment there and I can stay with him if I like, but we’ve kept our house in Scarsdale because we like tennis and the pool and all that.”

“He hasn't married again?”

“Oh, yes — a girl not much older than I — well, Louise is twenty-six.”

“They’re happy?”

“Oh, yes, Louise is so beautiful that I’m glad she didn’t see Jared before she married my father. But all these marriages have taught me such a lot, Mrs. Chardman. I don’t want ever to be divorced. I want to marry someone I shall always love — like Jared.”

“You must also be someone he can always love,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” the girl agreed. “That’s why I’ve come to you. He says he’ll love you forever.”

…“Your little girl spent the afternoon with me,” she told Jared that night at midnight.

“I have no little girl,” he retorted.

“Well, a little girl, then!” she laughed.

“I suppose you mean June Blaine.”

“Yes!”

“Yes, well, she’s the one I once told you about. It’s been off and on for a couple of years and now it’s off.”

“She doesn’t think so.”

“She’s strong — that I admit. But all girls are strong these days.”

“And you don’t like that?”

“Haven’t time to think about it. What are you doing this weekend?”

She hesitated, searching for an excuse, even a mild lie. “I’ve promised an old friend.”

“Man?”

“No — woman.” She could summon Amelia and they could go to the summer theater.

“Well—” He was reluctantly giving up the weekend.

“Perhaps June—” she suggested.

He broke in sharply. “Look here — don’t you go matchmaking!”

“Of course not, it’s just loyalty to one’s kind.”

“I’m your kind!”

“I know that, darling, but—”

“No buts!”

“Very well. Shall we say good night on this moment of agreement?”

“I don’t know. You seem different, as though the agreement were only skin deep.”

“Ah, no, Jared! It’s very deep. I’m for you — ever and ever. There’s no agreement deeper than that.”

She could hear him draw a deep breath.

“That’s what I wanted to hear. Now I can say good night.”

“Good night, dearest.”

Like an echo his voice came back to her—

“Dearest!”

…“I hear Edmond Hartley was at your house,” Amelia said.

They were sitting midway to the tent-like ceiling of the theater-in-the-round in a suburb of the city. Amelia had decided on the play, a revival of an old musical.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Oh, our built-in intercom,” Amelia replied. “Your chauffeur to mine and then to my upstairs maid who brings my breakfast when I’m too lazy to get up.”

“Does Edmond Hartley interest you?”

“Once he did — very long ago — until I found out I didn’t interest him. No woman does. But he was charming in spite of that — and rich!”

“He’s still charming.”

“And not married?”

“No.”

This was in the intermission. Amelia had declared that it was absurd to climb down the steps and up again in such a crowd. Besides, there was nowhere to go. She began once more.

“Do you know, Edith, I sometimes wonder if marriage with a man like that, at our age, anyway, wouldn’t be rather pleasant. One would have companionship, someone to travel with, a friend always present — and no demands!”

“I couldn’t endure it,” she said vehemently.

“Why not?”

“I’d want all of marriage — or none.”

Amelia made shrill laughter. “You’re confessing, Edith, you’re confessing!”

“I have nothing to confess except a deep respect for love.”

“Well, I’d settle for diversion,” Amelia said. The audience was swarming up the aisles again and there was a bustle on the stage. But the conversation was background for the following week, the last of June. A letter written on heavy cream paper with embossed name and address announced that the sender was Edmond Hartley, asking if he might call upon her, “to pay my respects,” the next Tuesday, on his way to Washington to judge designs for murals to be placed in a museum there. She would have replied that she was engaged, except that she thought of Amelia.

“And an old friend of mine,” she added as postscript to her own answering letter, “will be here to greet you. I believe she knew you long ago. Do come!”

He came late on Tuesday afternoon, in a small Daimler limousine, driven by an elderly English chauffeur. She saw him arrive and pause to direct the man and then he walked in his sprightly somewhat mincing fashion to the door. Weston opened it and announced him in the music room. She rose from the piano, where she had been working on a Chopin étude, and put out her hands, which he took in his cool dry grasp.

“How beautiful the music sounds! This is my favorite étude. I must hear it all.”

His eyes were as brightly blue as ever above his white clipped beard and trim mustache. A handsome man, she thought, in his precise, delicate fashion, and she felt a mild affection for him, combined with a real respect. A complicated personality, this! But under the complexities, the result of untold experience, here was an honorable person who had dealt rigorously with himself.

“My dear,” he said, “I am dusty with travel. Let me make myself fit for your beautiful eyes.”

“Then we’ll have cocktails on the east terrace,” she said. “And my old friend, Amelia Darwent, will join us. Do you remember her? She remembers you very well indeed.”

Edmond Hartley looked blank. “I don’t remember—”

“Ah, well, she will recall herself to you. Now go upstairs — the same room and sitting room.”

He went away and she returned to the étude, the third. She had begun it after Arnold’s death, when she was learning the meaning of sorrow, and not only the sorrow of death but the deeper sorrow of knowing that what had been was not all that it could have been had there been more understanding and therefore more communication between Arnold and herself. They had both done the best they could together. If she realized there might have been, a deeper happiness, so had he. Of that she was sure, for she had sometimes felt his gaze upon her and, lifting her head, had seen sadness in his eyes, and silently had respected that sadness, comprehending in her own reserve the inexorable distance between them. Neither she nor Arnold had overcome that reserve, but the knowledge and acceptance were painful.

Upon the day of his funeral, she had returned to this house alone, for she longed to be alone and rejected the affectionate offers of her children to come home with her. “No, my dears,” she had told them. “Go home to your children. Be with them, and I shall be happy. Indeed, I am quite all right. I’ll take a sleeping pill tonight — I am very tired”—and there alone she had begun the étude. It was divided into three parts, the first the statement of sorrow, a query as to why the sorrow must be. In the second part question rose to protest and wild demand. In the closing third, the question was unanswered, the demand unheeded and the theme was expressed again and finally, this time by acceptance of the inexorable.

When the last chord died under her hands, she heard Amelia’s voice.

“If I had a heart, it would break when you play that.”

She turned. Amelia was sitting in a gold chair, looking very smart in a cocktail dress of silver lamé.

“When did you come?” she asked.

“Ten minutes ago. I wouldn’t let Weston announce me. I haven’t heard you play for a long time — months. You play better than ever, Edith. I’m furious with my parents that they didn’t make me keep practicing.”

“As I remember it,” she said, smiling, “you hated them for making you practice for two years.”

“They shouldn’t have listened to my complaining,” Amelia insisted. “They should have beaten me. As it is, I blame them for my not having the ability now to comfort myself with music. They should have had more backbone.”

“They wanted their only daughter to love them.”

“A stupid way to win love! They should have known that the only way to be loved is to be stronger than the one you love.”

“I never before heard you talk about love, Amelia.”

“That’s not to say I have no ideas on the subject!”

They were interrupted by the arrival of Edmond Hartley. He had changed his suit to a tan surah silk, and he wore jade cuff links and tie pin. Amelia put out her hand.

“Well, Edmond!” she said, surveying him. “You’re handsomer than ever.”

He returned her gaze and she released his hand.

“Now I remember you,” he said. “You’re the girl who always beat me at tennis!”

He turned. “This young woman, Mrs. Chardman, had the most evil backhand. And she was quicksilver on her feet. I was agile, or so I thought, but she was fleet as — as a — young gazelle, and I simply could not win. I could never make up my mind whether to love her or hate her!”

Amelia laughed in delight. “You never did make up your mind,” she declared.

“I never did,” he agreed.

They looked at each other, comparing themselves as to age. How had the years dealt with them, and with which the more kindly? An old attraction stirred. As nearly as he had ever come to marriage he had once nearly married Amelia Darwent. Each of them now remembered.

…That night when Jared called she told him, half in amusement, “Your uncle, Jared, is reviving an old attraction. Love is too strong a word. But he and Amelia once knew each other. They forgot and now remember again. He went away after dinner, but I heard him ask Amelia if he might call upon her tomorrow.”

Jared shouted laughter. “It’s as far as he will go, bless him!”

To her own surprise, she was suddenly annoyed with him. “Don’t laugh, Jared! He’s a tragic man — and a good man.”

“Of course he’s good, but—”

“No but! He’s come to terms with himself, and knowing himself, he’s refused the best life can give.”

“That being—”

“Love, of course. How young you are,” she said almost contemptuously and her heart began suddenly to ache.

“I don’t understand you,” he said, very blunt.

“There’s no need to,” she replied.

…Deliberately during the next few days she devoted herself to Edmond Hartley and Amelia. Seeming to see nothing, she saw everything. She understood Amelia so well and so affectionately. Amelia had always been direct and never was she more direct than now. She walked across the lawns and appeared at odd hours, always beautifully dressed for the time of day, looking handsome in her somewhat severe fashion, her stubborn gray hair fashionably cut, her skirts short enough to reveal her shapely legs. Black and white suited her, and she wore white for the warm summer days and long diaphanous black gowns in the evening. Her abrupt ways, her clipped speech, combined with her almost ostentatious deference to Edmond, obviously touched and pleased him. It had been a long time since a woman had paid him attention. He ceased to shrink from being alone with her and began to suggest a stroll through the trees. Amelia accepted each invitation immediately and it became almost usual that before the cocktail hour Edith saw the two tall figures, Edmond an inch or two the taller, strolling aim in arm about the grounds. She was prepared, therefore, for Amelia's forthright announcement one evening in July.

“Edith, I’ve just asked Edmond Hartley to marry me.”

“Amelia, have you really?” she exclaimed. “And what did he say?”

Amelia gave her short bark of laughter. “He couldn’t very well refuse, could he, without being impolite, so he said he considered it an honor and accepted.”

They were in her upstairs room, whither Amelia had followed her. She was lying on the chaise longue, resting for half an hour before dressing for dinner.

“Amelia, I suppose you know—”

Amelia finished the sentence impatiently. “That he’s not interested in sex with a woman? Yes, I know — I’ve always known. Why do you suppose I’ve never married? I was mad about him when we were young. He was the handsomest man in the world. Then he told me, yes, Edith, he told me! I’ve always admired him for that. He’s so — decent. He understood himself, he had himself in hand. He was never going to let himself — well, you know! He was simply going to live without sex. It was so brave of him. Wasn’t it brave? Yes, and so I have, too. You’ll think it silly and old-fashioned of me. But there simply hasn’t been another love for me, either, and sex without love just doesn’t — well, appeal to me. Of course for a while I was shocked, even repelled, healthy beast that I was. We didn’t see each other for a long time. But gradually during the years I’ve come to see that sex isn’t all that matters between people and gradually sex has been drained away. What’s left now is love. That’s what I said to him. ‘Edmond, I love you. You, yourself. I want to live in the same house with you, be near you, that’s all.’ He said, as I told you, that ‘it would be an honor.’”

She thought she had known Amelia from earliest memory and now perceived that she had not known her. So many years she had been wrong, but now she understood her friend and with understanding she felt a real love for a sister woman.

“I respect you both,” she said quietly. “When will you be married?”

“As soon as we can arrange the legalities,” Amelia told her. “Then Edmond will move into my house. We’ve discussed everything. He can have the east wing for himself. There will be plenty of room to hang all his paintings. Edith, I can’t tell you how happy I am. I’m glad I had the courage to face the truth we’ve always known, that we ought to spend our lives together. He’s so — honorable. He would never have asked me. So I put aside false modesty and all that, and I asked him.”

“Then I am glad, too,” she said.

Amelia had opened a door and revealed a secret chamber.

…“I want you to marry,” she told Jared. She had pondered constantly upon Amelia’s courage and from it had drawn strength.

Unconsciously he drove more quickly. It was a Sunday afternoon in midsummer and he had appeared suddenly unannounced to take her to a country inn to dinner. She had been alone and a trifle at loose ends, for Amelia three days ago had announced that she and Edmond were going to Europe, after a brief and inconspicuous wedding ceremony. No, she would not tell even her dear friend Edith Chardman where they were going, nor exactly when, but they would be in touch with her upon their return. The next day Amelia’s big house was closed, except for a caretaker. She missed Amelia more than she had thought possible, for the last link with her childhood was gone and no other took her place. Even the thought of her son and daughter did not relieve her loneliness. They had their own lives and she had hers apart by generation and sophistication. Their stage was the procreation of children and the establishment of their own family structures, whereas she — at what stage was she? Time and space surrounded her as a solitary traveler upon a desert is surrounded by sand and sky. She felt so weakened indeed by inner loneliness that she had almost wept when Jared telephoned her to propose this evening journey.

“I want you to marry,” she repeated when he did not reply.

Instead of speaking, he pulled up abruptly in the overhanging shade of a huge ash tree. It was that moment in summer when growth is ended, and nature contemplates the annual death of winter. The air was languid and birds were silent.

“Now,” he said, “let’s have this out. I shall never love anyone as I love you.”

“I accept that,” she said, “and still I say I want you to marry.”

“Will you marry me, Edith?”

“No,” she said gently.

“Why not?”

Easy enough to say simply that she was too old, that when he was in his prime she would be an aged woman, but she did not reply simply. There was between them the communication of a love that had nothing to do with the accident of birth. They were two human beings who recognized their complete congeniality, their total trust, which were the components of love. Nevertheless, she had a responsibility of which she was becoming aware, at first dimly but now, day by day, more clearly. Nothing must impede the fulfillment of Jared’s whole development as a man, rich in talents and capable of rich growth, mental and spiritual. Yet he was a man, a human creature, with human needs. These needs she could not totally fulfill, and were they not so fulfilled, could the final development take place? She believed not. She could not live with him as an everyday wife. She could not give him children. Indeed she had no wish so to do. And yet, had she been able, could she also have given what she now gave him so joyously in companionship? She doubted that she could. He was no simple creature. The spectrum of his being was radiantly total and she comprehended the totality.

“I know I cannot marry you, Jared,” she said now.

“Are you afraid of what people will say?”

“I am not afraid,” she told him.

“Then why?”

“I know I must not.”

“Why, why?”

“I don’t know, but I must not, for your own sake.”

He was silent after this, and she was silent, waiting. Then he put the car into gear and drove on, until they reached the country inn, once an old mill. The great dark waterwheel still turned slowly, dripping the clear brook water as it had done for a century and more. The wood was covered with wet green moss, and under the shade of a huge overhanging sycamore tree, the water slipped smoothly over the stones and on its way to the river.

They stood side by side for moments, she and Jared, watching the turning wheel. Suddenly he seized her hand resolutely and drew it into the crook of his arm.

“Come along,” he said. “I’m starved.”

They entered the dining room together and in his imperious fashion he declined the table to which the waitress led them.

“That table by the window,” he ordered.

They sat down, he decided upon cocktails and entrée, while she waited in acquiescence, not caring what she ate and drank so long as she was with him. Of course she loved him. Yes, she was in love with him. No, she would never separate herself from him. One after the other these facts announced themselves in her being, but did not in the least or in total change her decision.

He leaned on his elbows and faced her, his eyes bleakly dark. “Now, then,” he said, “let’s have it out. Why do you insist upon my marrying someone?”

“Not someone,” she amended. “Just June Blaine. I like her. She’s honest. She wants to marry you.”

“I know that, but—”

“No buts! Of course the final decision is yours, but I want you to know that I — approve.”

He stared at her, puzzled. “I don’t understand you.”

She smiled and was silent.

He continued. “You know — you and I—”

She broke in. “I know.”

His eyes, so direct in their gaze, held her prisoner. She could not look away.

“Will I ever understand you?” he demanded.

“Perhaps it’s not — necessary.” Her voice faltered.

“Nevertheless, I’d like to,” he persisted.

“Not — necessary,” she repeated, her voice a whisper.

“Now you’re hiding somewhere,” he declared.

She shook her head. “Just being — myself.”

“I don’t like mysteries!”

“No mystery, Jared, perhaps intuition. I know you so well — better than I know myself, I think! I see so clearly what you are and what you will be. You will be one of the few great men of your generation — even of all generations, I think! Nothing must go wrong. You must have — everything. And June will be part of that everything. And I tell you, I like her! One doesn’t find honesty in women too often these days. It’s like finding a diamond among pebbles. You can’t pass it by. You must not. You must take it in your hand, examine it, test it, and if it’s true, keep it. That’s all I’m asking — no, I don’t ask, I suggest.”

“I won’t even talk about it,” he said bluntly. “Here are our cocktails. I drink to you!”

And he lifted his glass.

…Hours later, lying awake in her bed, she turned to the telephone on the table beside her and lifting the receiver, she dialed June, guessing that she, too, was sleepless, and heard her voice, instant and alert.

“Yes?”

“June, it is I, Edith Chardman.”

“Yes, Mrs. Chardman?”

“I want to tell you I am going away for a few weeks — maybe months.”

“Is there something you want me to do?” June’s voice spoke puzzlement.

“Only what your heart tells you, while I am gone.”

She waited. Was June perceptive enough, quick enough, understanding enough, to know what she was saying?

A moment of silence and the girl’s answer came, quiet and controlled.

“Thank you, Mrs. Chardman.”

“Good night, my dear,” she said and put the receiver back in its place.

…In the morning she rose late, rested after deep sleep. She had been able to sleep at once after the telephone call to June, as though she had fulfilled a duty, a purpose, and having fulfilled, had relaxed into peace. Now, the sun already nearing zenith, she got up and went to the window, as she always did in the morning, to judge the day, in this case a perfectly clear August day, the cloudless sky blue above the trees. It was a day to strengthen her soul with its beauty and she was strengthened. She had told June she was going away, but where would she go? Until the moment she had spoken the words she had had no intention of going away. Yet those very words had risen to her lips with conviction, as though they were the fruit of meditation and resolution. Where could she go? Standing irresolute before the open window, the morning breeze stirring the filmy folds of her long nightgown, and lifting her loosened hair, she suddenly thought of Edwin’s house in the mountains, two hundred miles away.

Perhaps it stood empty, perhaps his children were there, perhaps anything, but at least she would go and see. No one could find her there, and she had never told Jared of that love, nor indeed anyone. Then she would go and in the presence of Edwin’s memory, she would find herself again, not as she had been, for love had changed her, love for Jared, but as she was now to be until the end of her life. For there would never be another love. She had known them all, each love different from the other, each meaningful; each illuminating and valuable and to be cherished. Nor was it ended. Her love for Jared would continue for she had no wish to stop it. Let it grow, a source of comfort and inspiration to her, as hers had been for Edwin, but with even greater responsibility. She must assume that responsibility — it was now to make love a source of comfort and inspiration to Jared. The torch of love must be handed on from one heart to another, from one generation to the next, for without love life was meaningless and the spirit died. Yes, that was her duty and her delight, to pour her love into Jared’s life and see him grow. It was not a love affair. It was love.

…The great house stood silent in the golden light of late afternoon. The heavy door was locked. There, where Edwin had always stood to welcome her, his arms outstretched to enfold her, no one stood. The flower beds were neglected, early chrysanthemums and late roses blooming in bright confusion. A bird called, its lonely cry piercing the stillness. She lifted the huge brass knocker and let it fall and heard the echo inside the hall. She waited. Surely someone must be here, a watchman, a caretaker, a housekeeper? The house stood alone, five miles from the nearest village, a solitary road leading to the gate. With its treasures of books and paintings, the furniture of a lifetime rich in possessions, it could not stand untended here on this hill, surrounded by forests and beyond the forests, mountains. Five peaks were clear against the evening sky, two of them already tipped with early frost.

Now from a distance within the house she heard footsteps, now the grating scrape of a metal bar, or perhaps of a large key — she could not remember. The door opened a few inches, and she saw the gnarly face of Henry Haynes, Edwin’s manservant.

“Why, Mrs. Chardman!” His grainy voice had not changed. “Whatever—”

“Can you put me up for a week — or two — or three?”

“Well, now—”

He opened the door wide. “Come in. There’s nobody here but my wife and me. I married the cook. I don’t know as you remember her. Dr. Steadley put her in his will and it seemed easy just to — come in, Mrs. Chardman. The family was here for the summer but they’ve all gone and we was settling ourselves in for the winter.”

He led the way as he talked. She stood in the wide hall and looked about her. Everything was the same, the furniture polished, the floors dustless! There was even a bowl of golden chrysanthemums on the hall table, a great Satsuma bowl, which she remembered well, for Edwin had found it in Japan. Yet how empty the house was!

She stood hesitating. Could she bear his absence here in this house? The loneliness was too intense. She felt solitary as she had never felt before, not even when Arnold died and left her alone in her own house. Edwin had meant more to her than she had realized. Would the loneliness of his absence now overwhelm her, make her afraid?

“Everything is like when he was here,” Henry was saying. “Beds made, fires laid — everything. I even took out his winter things yesterday and aired them. My wife says, ‘Henry, he don’t know,’ but I know, I tell her, I know. Shall you have the same room, Mrs. Chardman?”

“Yes, the same.”

She followed him up the stairs and down the hall to the remembered door. He opened it and she went in.

“It looks exactly as it did,” she said.

“And will always be,” Henry said. “He wants it like that. ‘Henry,’ he says, ‘keep it like it always was. I don’t know if I can come back, but keep it as if I could!’ So I keep it, books dusted, everything.”

“Perhaps he knows,” she murmured.

Now that she was here, she was tired, she realized. She took off her hat and saw her face in a mirror, white and tired.

“You’ll have dinner early as possible,” Henry said. “I’ll tell my wife. It’ll be good to have something to do.”

“Thank you, Henry,” she said. When he was gone, she unpacked her two bags and put things away into drawers.

But I needn’t stay, she thought, I can just go away at any moment, any day, if I can’t bear it. Only where would I go?

She sat down before the small mahogany desk near the western window. The sun was setting, it seemed at this moment to rest upon the rocky peak of the highest mountain, and she watched it sink until the last edge of gold was gone. Then she lit all the lamps in the room and put a match to the logs in the fireplace, and having done so, felt herself somehow at home, though still alone.

…The first early snow was falling, although the last bright leaves were still clinging to the maple trees when she put aside the curtains of her bedroom one morning and saw the large soft flakes drifting past the window. Henry had turned up the furnace.

She drew back the curtain and fastened it, and a white light filled the room. She lit the fire, the logs piled ready in the chimney piece, and slowly, luxuriously, she showered and dressed and went downstairs to breakfast. There in the breakfast room Henry had lit a fire and had moved a small table beside it.

“It’s sharp this morning,” he said.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“Dr. Steadley always liked snow.”

“I know.”

“It’s queer how he still seems to be in this house,” Henry said.

“Do you feel it, too?” she asked.

“Times I come in, I almost hear his voice,” Henry said.

“If you believe he is here, then to that degree he is here,” she replied.

She was aware of a strange confidence as she spoke. If any presence could be believed, surely Edwin was that one. But she was a skeptic. What had been was no more. He had left this shell, this habitation, behind him and was gone. She was singularly alone, more alone, she reflected, than if she had never lived here with him. Nor did she wish him back. She had come here to learn how to live alone, and she pressed her loneliness into her heart and flesh. She was alone, alone, so wrapped in her solitary being that she did not even notice that Henry had left the room.

…The solitary days passed, one after the other in a gray procession. Since no one knew where she was, there were no telephone calls. She spent her waking hours in the huge library, studying books she had never read before, books of Asian history and philosophy. Edwin had traveled much in that part of the world, and now she began to understand how much Asia had shaped his character. The natural freedom, the ease with which he had accommodated the physical with the philosophical, was Asian. The body was only the manifestation of the spirit, translating into terms of flesh and blood, pulse and heartbeat, the yearnings of the spirit. The need for physical love was only a materialization of the spirit's craving for communication. There was no essential difference between flesh and spirit, simply a difference in mode of expression.

Jared had not progressed so far, however. Nor indeed had she. Flesh was of the flesh. When she thought of Jared in the flesh, she thought of his body. His spirit was apart. She could and did think of his spirit, but it was something in itself. Spiritually he was a creator. Just now, of course, he was only a beginner. He was creating tools, mechanisms to satisfy his creative compulsion. He had to make something with his hands, something he could see and use, a noble instinct, but on a first level, His creativity was motivated by compassion, a worthy instinct, but not strong enough in itself to reach the fulfillment of his capacity as a creator. In days gone by, the creator always found his fulfillment in art, but now the greatest artists were scientists. Science was so exciting, so new, so all but insuperable that it challenged every creative mind. She had no doubt that if he were not impeded, Jared would grow into a great scientist.

If he were not impeded! But no one could impede him except her, herself. Somehow she had come into his life at a moment when he needed to worship and he had worshiped her. What does a woman do with a man’s worship? She can destroy it by her own selfish need — or she can use it for his development and growth.

I must never let him know, she thought.

But know what?

She must never let him know that she was merely woman. She must never descend to daily need, if she wanted to keep him. No, even that was selfish. There could be no question of “keeping.” She must rise to heights of her own. She must be quite willing to release him while she loved him — even because she loved him, for love, if it be true, seeks only the fulfillment of the beloved and this on the highest level.

Slowly, day after day, she moved her way dimly to a new definition of love, eliminating every trace of selfishness in order that she might find the purest satisfaction. Slowly she rejected even loneliness and became no more alone but absorbed in her search for the substance of love in its essence. And all during this search she did not write to Jared or telephone him. She needed to be alone in order to outlive loneliness. When she was no longer lonely, she would find him again, or he would find her.

In such mood the days passed in the silent house. Days passed in which she spoke to no one except lo acknowledge Henry’s greeting, or answer his wife’s occasional question.

“Is everything all right, Mrs. Chardman?”

“Yes, thank you, Margaret.”

“Is there anything you would fancy to eat?”

“No, thank you. Whatever you prepare — it’s quite all right.”

Days passed into weeks. The snow fell heavily now and settled into permanence. Winter loomed. She wondered if she should return to her own house, and did not. Edwin was gone, and she lived entirely in the presence of Jared. He was no longer the young man from whom she had withdrawn herself. Slowly she came to see him as the man he would be someday, Jared the fulfilled, Jared the creator, master of himself, imaginative, dedicated, uncompromising in his creativity. He had become one of the few great men of his time, his acts of creation of art were no longer mere inventions. How would she know his greatness? When artist and scientist combined in him, he would be that great man.

…“Now I have found you,” Jared said.

He announced himself by arrival. She was at the piano that morning when the doorbell rang. She stopped to listen, she waited for Henry or Margaret to open the door but neither appeared. Then she opened the door herself and Jared stood there in the rain. Three days of rain had washed away the last snowfall.

“Have you been looking for me?” she asked. “Everywhere. No one could tell me where you were.”

“Because I told no one.”

“You wanted to hide from me!”

“Come in out of the rain.”

She threw the door wide, he shook himself, and came in, and took off his raincoat and hat. At the same moment Henry appeared, astonished at a guest, and taking both hat and coat, looked at her with inquiring eyes.

“Yes, Henry,” she said. “Mr. Barnow will be here — for the night, Jared?”

“If you’ll have me, but tomorrow I am taking you home.”

She did not reply to this, but led the way to the living room. The wind from the open door had blown the sheets of her music about, and he stooped and picked them up and set them on the rack of the piano. Then he sat down and looked her straight in the eyes.

“I’m doing what you told me to do,” he said. “I am marrying June Blaine.”

She heard and did not hear. Instead there was the rush of a sudden downpour of wind-driven rain. It beat against the French windows, it thundered upon the stones of the terrace. She lifted her head and listened to the sound of the storm.

“We’ll not get away tomorrow,” she murmured.

He stared at her. “Are you all right, Edith?”

When she did not reply he went to her and took her face between his palms. “I asked you, are you all right, Edith?”

She looked into his eyes. “Yes,” she said distinctly.

He released her then but he stood looking down at her. “You’ve been too long alone, that’s what’s wrong.”

She pushed him away gently. “Oh, no, I’m quite happy being alone. I’ve learned how.”

“I’m still in love with you,” he said with bitterness.

“Don’t say it!” she cried.

“But I will say it,” he insisted. “It’s hopeless, I know — but true, for all that!”

“It’s not fair to June,” she said.

“She knows,” he said doggedly. “I couldn’t marry her otherwise. Between you and me, I’ve told her, everything must be the same — forever.”

He turned away from her and walked to the window and stared out into the storm. “I hope I’m not trying to substitute her for you!”

This was no longer to be borne. She determined not to bear it. By force she would break the mood, too tense, too charged with emotion.

“Impossible,” she declared. “We are two entirely different women!”

In her heart she added, “She has her place — but I have mine!”

But she did not speak the words aloud.

…The change in mood continued. Henry entered at this moment to announce luncheon and over the business of food and drink, Jared’s appetite excellent, she made a show of mild interest in his plans.

“Shall you marry soon, Jared?”

“After she graduates from college in June.”

“Still so young! Lucky you!”

“I’ve known her for a couple of years, remember!”

“She’s a sensible little thing.”

“I wouldn’t marry her otherwise. I’ve made it clear to her that I have my work to do and that comes first — always will. It’s the penalty for marrying a dedicated scientist.”

“Shall you stay at this rehabilitation work?”

“No. Not really. I see now that it’s a side job, an avocation. I’ll always work at it occasionally. But it’s not my real job.”

He frowned and she waited. He began again. “I don’t know what my work is. Mending broken bodies — yes, of course, but that’s not it. Something in mathematics. I love the order, the elegance of mathematics. But even that is merely a tool, a means. I want to discover—”

“What?” She pressed him when he paused.

He lifted eyes half apologetic. “You’ll laugh — but it’s the only word that fits. I want to discover — the universe.”

“Thank God!” she cried softly under her breath.

He frowned again. “Why do you thank God?”

“Because you belong in your laboratory, Jared.”

She spoke with such decision that he put down knife and fork.

“How did you know?” he demanded.

“I know you,” she said. “I know you are basically an artist and an artist is always seeking revelation. You’re not just a technician. You’re a creator.”

Their eyes met, now unwavering, his in awe, hers in confidence.

“You know!” he whispered.

“Of course,” she said quietly, “And so I love you.”

…It was summer again. She was in a little church, waiting among a few strangers for the wedding march to begin. It was Jared’s wedding day. She had gone home in March, the snows of the winter melting except on the mountains. He had not stayed long, a day and a night, but she was not lonely when he left. She knew her place now in his life and her duty to love him as only she could do. She understood that the more she fulfilled her own life, the more wisdom she could learn, the more she could achieve in herself, the more complete she became — yes, even the more perfect, the better her love could serve him. She must be forever the abiding goddess. And this could only be fulfilled if she found her own way to that fulfillment, apart from Jared. But what was the way? Now that she had years ahead, how spend them toward fulfillment? She was her father’s daughter in mind and spirit, though her mother had created her flesh. She must, once this wedding was over, go apart and live with herself alone.

There had been no time until now, not really any time: Arnold’s death; Edwin, his love and death; Jared and his love and hers, only in its beginning now that its path lay clearly before her. There had been no time. Now there was time, infinite time, until the very end of her life. She need not hurry herself. Now she knew that she, too, must search, quietly and firmly, for her own completion, for were she not complete, she could not take her place in Jared’s completion.

The organist was beginning to play the introductory music to marriage, tender music, the mood reverent and subdued. About her the people waited, their faces half smiling as they remembered, each his own remembering. The church was old-fashioned, very simple, almost a country church. Here June had been christened and by the very minister, then young, who was to perform the ceremony. He came in now, wearing his robes. In front of him walked two small boys, choristers, who carried lighted torches. When they reached the altar the small boys lit the candles on either side, and then took their places. The tender music drew to a close. A door to the side of the chancel opened and Jared came in with his best man, someone she did not know, a fellow scientist, he had told her, a brilliant boy of a man, he had said, working in space science. “He lives and breathes on a new level of existence,” Jared had said. “He makes the rest of us look earthbound and old hat.”

She remembered these words, but her eyes were on Jared. He looked abstracted, far away, almost unconcerned. How well she knew that look, how often her mother had complained of her father.

“Raymond! Do you hear a word I’m saying?”

Sometimes, half laughing, her mother said to those about her, “I don’t believe he even heard our marriage ceremony!”

Ah, June must learn to understand this divine abstraction, this cosmic absence! Once, she herself had inquired of a young wife whose young husband had traveled into space.

“Did he come back the same?”

“Not the same,” the young wife had said sadly. “Never quite the same.”

Ah, but June must be proud, not sad! And then, as though at the thought of June, the wedding march broke joyfully across the air. The audience rose and turned to watch the pretty procession, a little girl in a short pink frock walked down the aisle, scattering rose petals, behind her a tiny boy carrying a white satin ring cushion, and then, one after the other, three bridesmaids — young, all so young, all pretty in pink frocks. And at last June in bride’s white, the gleam of satin, the froth of lace, she walking beside her father, her white-gloved hand in his elbow, a tall graying man, still handsome, a famous man in the world, a great man in his way. But none would be greater than Jared. This was her lifework.

Then almost immediately it was over, the ceremony stripped to its essentials.

“I don’t want any nonsense,” Jared had said firmly.

There was no nonsense. The brief vows were said, be came down the aisle, head held high, and June clung to his arm, smiling bravely. A dart of compassion struck her heart. This young wife! It would not be easy to be Jared’s wife. She must think, too, of June, for June unhappy would be a burden Jared must not bear. And yet, she told herself, she must never interfere.

She laughed inside herself. Only a goddess could fulfill all that she was demanding of herself. This, then, was her first task, to make of herself a goddess, the first task and the most difficult. She must set herself apart if she was to fulfill the monumental task, which in itself must be perfection.

Someone, a young man, an usher, came to escort her down the aisle, and she walked to the door and out of the church to her waiting car. An hour’s solitary drive, and she was not lonely, an hour’s solitary drive and she was at the house again, and only when she entered the door did she remember there was a reception somewhere, at June’s home somewhere, a wedding cake to be cut, all of which she had forgotten, as abstracted in her own way as Jared in his, but she had her own dreams. Not to be fulfilled in this house, nor in any other in which she had ever lived! The knowledge came with the suddenness of conviction. She must build herself a house of her own, in the place which she had chosen so blindly, a place by the sea. The plans were where she had put them in a drawer in her desk. She had put them there months ago, not knowing whether she would ever finish them. Now she knew.

She took off her hat and tossed it to a chair. She went to the library, to her desk, and opened the drawer. The plans were there, as she had left them. She sat down and studied them. She could see the house as though it were already standing solitary on the cliff, overlooking the sea. The idea in itself was reality. As Edwin had said, the very idea of immortality made reality. Now the idea of the house, of herself, of Jared, were realities.

She heard a cough at the door. She looked up and saw Weston waiting.

“If you please, madame,” he said, “is there anyone here for dinner?”

“Only I — myself,” she said.