The Professor hosts the children

The Professor, an elderly man with shaggy white hair that grew over most of his face, lived in a very large house in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office. He had no wife and was attended by a housekeeper named Mrs. Macready and three servants. When the four Pevensie children—Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy—were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids, they were sent to his house. He came out to meet them at the front door on the first evening, and though his odd appearance made Lucy a little afraid and Edmund want to laugh, they liked him almost at once. The Professor gave the children the run of his house, setting apart a long, low room with two windows looking out in one direction and two in another for them to use. He was a very old man, and the children quickly sensed that he would let them do anything they liked.

The Professor's Logical Defense of Lucy

When Lucy first returned from Narnia and told her story about the Faun and the magic wardrobe, her siblings did not believe her. Edmund spitefully pretended the whole thing was a game, and Peter and Susan began to think Lucy was either lying or going mad. The next morning, they decided to go and tell the whole thing to the Professor, hoping he would write to their father if he thought something was really wrong with Lucy. The Professor listened to them with the tips of his fingers pressed together and never interrupting, till they had finished the whole story. After a long silence, he cleared his throat and said the last thing either of them expected: "How do you know that your sister's story is not true?" When Susan objected that Edmund had said they had only been pretending, the Professor asked which of the two children they regarded as the more truthful. Peter admitted that up till now he would have said Lucy every time. The Professor then coolly dismissed the possibility of madness, saying, "One has only to look at her and talk to her to see that she is not mad." He laid out the logical possibilities: "Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth." When Peter argued that if things are real they are there all the time, the Professor simply asked, "Are they?" and Peter did not know what to say. When Susan pointed out that Lucy had had no time to have gone anywhere, the Professor turned this into the very thing that made her story likely to be true, suggesting that another world might have a separate time of its own. He muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools."

The Professor's Final Advice

At the end of the story, after the children had returned from Narnia and found that four coats from his wardrobe were missing, they felt they really must explain to the Professor. He did not tell them not to be silly or not to tell lies, but believed the whole story. He advised them not to try going back through the wardrobe door to get the coats, saying they would not get into Narnia again by that route. He assured them they would get back to Narnia again some day, but cautioned, "Don't go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don't try to get there at all. It'll happen when you're not looking for it." He told them not to talk too much about it even among themselves, and not to mention it to anyone else unless they found that others had had adventures of the same sort. He concluded, "Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?"