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,