The Goddess Abides: A Novel by Pearl S. Buck

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