"Oh no!" she said in response to his comment about their mother, though her alarm was only half genuine. "How terribly inconvenient it would be to live alone. I'll have to start talking about some other project I've been saving for, so she doesn't think I'm about to move out," Jules mused. While she understood that some people needed a certain degree of freedom from their parents at a given stage in life, she had never found her parents difficult to live with in the slightest. She pretended to be annoyed sometimes when her mother made demands on her time, particularly when they involved going to parties or other social events that she wasn't interested in of her own accord, but the truth was that this was a very small price to pay for the continued living arrangement. Generally, she enjoyed her parents' company, and they let her do more or less what she pleased with her time outside of work. Besides, if she went to live on her own, how on earth would she eat? She'd have to hire her own cook, she imagined, because there was no chance that she'd be able to put together a meal on her own — and she certainly couldn't afford that while keeping up her copious amounts of research.

Although, she supposed, there was a chance that if her research was well-received and they wanted to publish more of it, she might get some income from that. How amazing would that be, to actually be paid to do the thing she loved doing? It was probably unrealistic, since she didn't think academic papers ever paid exceptionally well even for the most profound and meaningful research, but even getting some pittance from it would be something to be proud of, she thought.

"That's kind of you," she said in response to his offer to tell people Professor Forfang was a recluse, "But I doubt it will be necessary. It's just one journal article," she pointed out. "And it's not as though the whole of society reads academic research. I don't think he'll become a sensation," she said with a slight giggle — never dreaming that by this time next month, the 'elusive Professor Forfang' would actually find himself featured on the front page of the Prophet.