Right now was where he'd take it, and at this Aber-where-was-it--ah, here.... Done with the girl? He realized that he had not yet begun with her. CHAPTER XIV HOME AND THE CHARM "A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there, Which, seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere." Still-Popular Song. There was one thing that struck Olwen very forcibly as soon as she got down to that house of her Aunt Margaret's in Wales. It was the first time for many months that she had entered a dwelling-place that was also a home. Where had she been all this time? In places of which the keynote was "Here today and gone tomorrow"; places that she had never even seen a year ago; places without associations, without responsibilities for the pilgrim-guest. There had been Les Pins; its hotel.... Cap Ferret and its charming inn. Other hotels in Paris and London. There had been the Honeycomb; its busyness still informed by the hotel spirit of "_Dwell as if about to depart_." Then there had been her Aunt's villa at Wembley Park; delightful little red-roofed, rose-wreathed doll's-house! There was an impermanency about that, too; it looked as if a gale of wind would carry it off, with the row of other red-and-white toy-dwellings in the midst of which it stood. It was a place to picnic and to sleep in, and of one which one turned the latch-key without giving it all day a further thought. The same note was struck by Mrs. Cartwright's prettily-arranged flat. In three hours, perhaps, she could pack up and move ... somewhere, anywhere that suited her! (People lived where they liked, after all, instead of making it a religion to like where they lived.) The same could be said of Mrs. Newton's rooms at her hotel, and of the bachelor-diggings of half a dozen War-working girls whom Olwen knew in London. The new note was spreading. Domestic life as lived under Queen Victoria seemed at a discount. And to more and more of England's young womanhood one might apply the plaintive remark of the straphanger to the other occupants of the crowded 'bus: "Ain't _none_ o' you got no 'omes?" But here, on the outskirts of this provincial town where generations of the Howel-Joneses had been born, had lived and married and died----here one found oneself swept back to the domestic conditions of more than half a century ago. Ah, the solidity of this square grey house, padded with ancient ivy and roofed with purple slate! Oh, the density of that laurel hedge, screening its lawn from the road that wound up towards the mountains! Heavens, the ponderous comfort of the furniture; every mahogany "piece," every _portière_, every vast Landseer steel engraving upon the walls seemed to remind Olwen "We were here in your grandmamma's time, and your great-grandmother's and you, little superficial upstart, what right have you to turn up your nose at what was good enough for them?"