to persuade her that I was not an eccentric one.
I repeated that I had studies to pursue; that I wanted quiet; that I
delighted in a garden and had vainly sought one up and down the city;
that I would undertake that before another month was over the dear old
house should be smothered in flowers. I think it was the flowers that
won my suit, for I afterward found that Miss Tita (for such the name of
this high tremulous spinster proved somewhat incongruously to be) had an
insatiable appetite for them. When I speak of my suit as won I mean that
before I left her she had promised that she would refer the question to
her aunt. I inquired who her aunt might be and she answered, "Why, Miss
Bordereau!" with an air of surprise, as if I might have been expected to
know. There were contradictions like this in Tita Bordereau which, as I
observed later, contributed to make her an odd and affecting person.
It was the study of the two ladies to live so that the world should not
touch them, and yet they had never altogether accepted the idea that it
never heard of them. In Tita at any rate a grateful susceptibility to
human contact had not died out, and contact of a limited order there
would be if I should come to live in the house.

"We have never done anything of the sort; we have never had a lodger or
any kind of inmate." So much as this she made a point of saying to me.
"We are very poor, we live very badly. The rooms are very bare--that you
might take; they have nothing in them. I don't know how you would sleep,
how you would eat."

"With your permission, I could easily put in a bed and a few tables and
chairs. C'est la moindre des choses and the affair of an hour or two.
I know a little man from whom I can hire what I should want for a few
months, for a trifle, and my gondolier can bring the things round in his
boat. Of course in this great house you must have a second kitchen, and
my servant, who is a wonderfully handy fellow" (this personage was an
evocation of the moment), "can easily cook me a chop there. My tastes
and habits are of the simplest; I live on flowers!" And then I ventured
to add that if they were very poor it was all the more reason they
should let their rooms. They were bad economists--I had never heard of
such a waste of material.

I saw in a moment that the good lady had never before been spoken to
in that way, with a kind of humorous firmness which did not exclude
sympathy but was on the contrary founded o