Esther knew that he was right, although she understood better than he the unworldly aims of the man.
Jacques had more to tell her. Such was the doctor's complete stupidity, not to be comprehended by rational beings, that whenever he had a little money put aside he would shut up shop and take a holiday, so as to be able to devote all his days to research.
"Mademoiselle knows that is not a way to do," complained Jacques in an aggrieved voice. "People think he not practise any more, they find another doctor. Many, many times he lose patients that way. Quelle bêtise, voyons!"
"He must have been practising pretty steadily now for some time," remarked Esther, "to have as good a practice as he seems to have."
"Ah, yes, it is long now, for him, and I think he gets now what you English call fed-up. I believe he would like to throw it all up to-morrow, but he cannot. It is the season, there are many English here. Later, in the summer, perhaps, he take a rest."
These confidences took place chiefly at déjeuner, which Esther ate alone in the salle à manger, a room more cheerful than the salon, being on the sunny side of the house. The doctor, consecrating the lunch hour to work, had his meal brought to the laboratory on a tray. The food was excellent, in the best French bourgeois style, cooked and served by Jacques, who did all the work of the place with the help of a femme de ménage in the mornings. He was frankly delighted when Esther did justice to his dishes.
"Mademoiselle will have a little more of the blanquette de veau," he would say pleadingly. "It is very good, yes, the champignons I choose myself. The doctor up there will eat whatever I give him. If it is bread and cheese it make no difference, but I, I say to him, 'Il faut que cette demoiselle soit nourié!'"
He was the one human element in the establishment, Jacques, and his familiarity was not offensive.
As for her employer, Esther decided that she could live at close quarters with him for a year and know him no better than she did now. At the end of a week she regarded him as an unknown quantity. A man of one idea, extraordinarily concentrated, methodical, abstracted, without friends, no outside interests whatever. That is all she could gather. Silent, yet hardly secretive, he merely gave her the impression that he had nothing he wished to impart. He was not curious about other people, why should they want to know about him? Not by any stretch of imagination could she connect him with a human emotion. He never asked her a question about herself or her antecedents, and only once did he volunteer any information in regard to himself, and then it seemed as though for a moment he was thinking aloud. He referred absent-mindedly to a time when he lived in Algeria, mentioning the fact that for almost two years he was able to experiment without interruption.
"I had a bit of money," he remarked, "a windfall…"