Mademoiselle Pouchée put the interruption quietly aside.
‘Mère loses her memory. We must not always heed her,’ she observed to Marjorie, presently. ‘In bygone days, when the good papa was living, our family received undergraduates as lodgers. Mère has the old time in her heart still.’
‘Jesuitry, Pouchée! I remember your talents in that line. In bygone days, when the good papa was living, no photograph of Tintajeux Manoir existed.’
The remark was accompanied by a Bartrand look, as familiar, as smiting to poor Pouchée as though she and Marjorie had done battle over some delicate point of moral faithfulness that very morning.
‘There are accidents—contingencies—nay, times being hard, there is necessity. As well confess the truth. We do not take lodgers.’ Pouchée’s eyes dwelt fondly on the inlaid cabinet, the porcelain, the exquisite order of the little salon. ‘We are private citizens—rentières, living on our means.’
‘And there is no one in the house save yourselves?’
A flourish of Pouchée’s fingers hinted negation. ‘The old place is, in fact, two houses, as you will see by daylight. There are rooms at the back that can be entered by a flight of open-air steps—steps dating from the fourteenth century, ma mie.’
‘You promised me truth—not history, Mademoiselle.’
‘And by hazard—for the moment—we have a locataire. Not an undergraduate. We spare a room or two, on occasion, to some quiet gentleman—some resident M.A.—some student from the Art Schools. No undergraduate sets foot within our doors. We are not licensed.’