Lindsay sat upright. “Did you by chance live here when Lutetia Murray was alive?”
“Well, I should say I did!” Mrs. Spash answered. “I lived here the last twenty years of Lutetia Murray’s life. I was her housekeeper, as you might say.”
Lindsay stared at her. He started to speak. It was obvious that conflicting comments fought for expression, but all he managed to say—and ineptly enough—was: “Oh, you knew her, then?”
“Knew her!” Mrs. Spash seemed to search among her vocabulary for words. Or perhaps it was her soul for emotions. “Yes, I knew her,” she concluded with a feeble breathlessness.
“You’ve lived in this house, then, for twenty years,” Lindsay repeated, musing.
“Yes, all of that.” Mrs. Spash appeared to muse also. For an instant the two followed their own preoccupations. Then as though they led them to the same impasse, their eyes lifted simultaneously; met. They smiled.
“I’ve bought this house, Mrs. Spash,” Lindsay confided. “And you never can guess why.”
Mrs. Spash started what appeared to be a comment. It deteriorated into a little inarticulate murmur.
“I bought it,” Lindsay went on, “because when I was in college, I fell in love with Lutetia Murray.” And then, at Mrs. Spash’s wide-eyed, faded stare, “Not with Miss Murray herself—I never saw her—but with her books. I read everything she wrote and I wrote in college what we call a thesis on her.”
“Sort of essay or composition,” Mrs. Spash defined thesis to herself.