“Not half as bored as I’d be if I went back to university,” said Lulu. “I know that’s what you all want.”

Emma sighed, abandoning her attempt at discretion. “Mom and Dad think you should at least give it a try,” she said.

“I know they do,” said Lulu. “And I know you do, too. And I’m sure Matthew agrees with you, and I’m pretty sure Mr. Goncharoff thinks the same way, and probably so do Sophie and Mrs. ScottRamsay and Dr. Broody, too, if you asked them. But interestingly enough, Tom the lodger, who is the only person in this entire lineup who is actually at a university, thinks I shouldn’t. And I’d like you, please, to put on your thinking cap and think very, very long and very, very hard about this, and after you’ve had a good long hard think in your thinking cap, I’d like you to tell me if this might just conceivably suggest anything to you.”

“You talked to Tom the lodger?” said Emma.

“We had coffee together this morning,” said Lulu. “We had quite a long talk about things, actually.”

“Did you, now?” said Emma, raising an interested eyebrow.

Which was, quite possibly, the sole thing that Emma could possibly have said that was more irritating that anything she had already said.

“Tom the lodger,” said Lulu, “is a hundred years old.”

“He’s thirty-nine,” said Emma. “We share the same birthday, funnily. Mom gave him a card last year, and he and I compared dates.” She twirled her wineglass thoughtfully, diverted now from the question of Lulu’s career. “He seems like a very nice guy, actually,” she said.

“He’s thirty-nine years old,” said Lulu. “He’s Mom and Dad’s lodger.”

“Thirty-nine’s not that old. And Dad’s always said you were an old soul.” Emma nodded, examining the idea and liking it. “He’s obviously intelligent, and you need that.”

“I don’t need anything,” said Lulu. “I had a cup of coffee with my parents’ middle-aged lodger to ask him, as someone who spends his life in the academic world, if he thought I should pursue an academic career. Which, by the way, he said he didn’t recommend, which I thought was very interesting and quite sensible.”

But Grandma Jo had married a professor, she thought then, a little alarmedly.

But when she had fallen in love with him, he had not been a professor but a student at the university, with thick yellow hair and deep blue eyes.

“It was a bit like being back in a tutorial,” she said. Although with a particularly kind and understanding tutor, she carefully did not add. “He’s really absentminded. He puts hot sauce on his scrambled eggs and hadn’t even noticed that no one in England does that. He said he drove his ex-wife crazy.”

“Well, there you are,” said Emma. “You’re like two peas in a pod. You can both be absentminded and drive each other crazy.”

But people were not required to fall in love with the next pea in the pod, thought Lulu. Grandma Jo had fallen in love with a charming young man with thick yellow hair, and he had fallen in love with her, and he had adored her.