Yes, thought Lulu, but his work meant reading eighteenth-century novels. Sophie had appeared in an adaptation of Tom Jones at drama school and had come home bursting with tales of unruly love, bold wenches, and erotic meals leading to tumbles in rumpled sheets in coaching inns. There were not many coaching inns, thought Lulu sadly, in the biochemistry department.

“What’s up?” he said. “Are you thinking of going back to college? Your mom tells me you’re some kind of genius at science.”

“And that’s another problem,” she said. “I do seem to be quite good at that stuff. And people keep telling me I should pursue it, but I just don’t want to, although I don’t know what else I do want to do. I do know I don’t want to do that, though.”

“Then don’t do it,” he said immediately.

“No?” She looked at him in surprise. It was the first time an older person had ever not tried to persuade her in the academic direction.

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head firmly. “It’s really one-dimensional, the academic life. If you go into it, it takes over your world and can become all that you do and think about. It suits me because I happen to be in love with my subject. But if you don’t really love it to the point that you’re almost obsessed with it, then it’s not for you.”

“Ha.” She was silent for a moment, digesting this new perspective. “But I do have to do something,” she said. “I’ll be twenty-five at the end of the year.”

He smiled. “That’s not so old,” he said. “And you don’t have to know yet what you’re going to do forever. Back in California people take years to figure out what they want to do. Of course, some of them end up never figuring it out at all, and that’s not so good. But there’s not as much hurry as you seem to think there is. Why don’t you just try doing something you like? What do you like?”

“I don’t know.” She thought for a moment, watching Maureen’s cat pick her way regally through the chairs to land and stretch in a puddle of sunshine. She liked cats, she thought. Cats didn’t feel the need to ingratiate themselves. “I like animals,” she said. “I don’t want to be a vet, though. And I definitely don’t want to work in a pet shop, because I don’t approve of them. But I do get on with animals, I always have. Sometimes I think I get on with animals better than I do with people.” She sighed. “I’m not very good with people, to tell you the truth.”

“In the eighteenth century,” he told her, “landowners used to think it was picturesque to have a hermit living on their properties. They’d build a hermitage and actually go out and hire someone to live in it. Maybe that’s a career path to consider.”

Lulu thought. “It’d be a healthy life,” she said then. “All that fresh air. Would they feed me?”