Jules smiled as the other woman laughed and cupped her hands further around her tea cup. "Yes, most of his adventures are fictional," she agreed. Not that she considered that a bad thing, personally; although she was a Gryffindor herself she had never had a problem spending an afternoon deeply engaged in a book, or even an entire day if the mood struck her. She did tend towards nonfiction more often, however, which was sort of a way of enjoying the experiences of others vicariously. That was the whole point of publishing research, she thought; some people were fortunate enough to go out and have experiences that changed the way they thought about the world, and they were able to go and share those experiences with others who couldn't, for reasons of time or finance or feasibility, repeat those same sorts of things. The entire world was the better for it — but only if people actually took the time to read them, of course.

"This is Diagon Alley," she added in response to the woman's question about whether they were still in London. She did have to wonder what had brought Miss Smith to London, though — she had said excavation earlier which lead Jules to believe she was an archaeologist. There were other types of professions that might find work at an excavation, of course, but none of them seemed to line up very well with the assumptions she could make about the woman in front of her. She didn't look, for instance, like someone who specialized in moving large quantities of dirt around through magic.

"Are you just here to visit family?" she asked, tilting her head slightly. "Or are you involved in that Pictish thing the Muggles found near Hogsmeade? I'd thought they'd had that all wrapped up, but — with all of the artifacts popping up in the news lately, perhaps not," she reflected. It was the only excavation she knew of in the British Isles, and since she regularly read various research journals as they were published, she did think she might have heard of something if a new one had opened up, even though archaeology was hardly her field. Unless Miss Smith was working on something brand new? How curious!