They do not answer “home”; nor do they even say “to our house.” They say “_the house_.” It may be a wretched, tumble-down shed: all the same it is the house, the only house in all the world. Some day there will be others,--perhaps. But that is not so certain, after all. Even young men and women, and quite grown persons, married folk, if you please, use the same expression. _At the house_ they used to do this, _at the house_ there was that. One might suppose they were speaking of their present house. Not at all; they are speaking of the house of their childhood, the house where their father and mother lived, and which they have not been able to keep, or the customs of which they have changed--it’s all one--but which in their memory is always the same. You quite understand that there cannot be two. I was a school-boy then; oh, just a little primary school child, perhaps seven or eight years old,--seven or eight I think. I always said “the house” just as people say _la patrie_ when they mean France. Still, I knew very well that there were people who called it by other names, names which sound grander to a child. The baby’s Italian nurse used to call it _il palazzo_, rounding her mouth for the second _a_, and letting the last syllable die gently away in a lingering whisper. The farmer who brought the rent, or more probably an instalment of it, or even a fowl of some sort, to encourage the master to have patience, would say _the château_, with several circumflex accents. A lady who came from Paris to visit us--you would know she was from Paris by the lorgnette which she carried--had given it the dignified title _your mansion_. And during the crisis of which I shall have presently to tell, any one might read on the humiliating bill that was posted on our front gate the words _Villa for sale_. Villa, mansion, château, palace, how colourless are all these majestic words, notwithstanding their fine sound! What was the use of tangling up the truth in words? “The house” is quite enough. “The house” tells the whole story. It is still there: it has an ancient habit of being there. You would have no trouble in finding it--the whole country knows the Rambert house, because our family has always lived in it. It has been carefully repaired--too carefully, indeed--from garret to cellar, furbished and decorated, repainted and polished outside and in. Of course it will not do to let houses go on forever wearing themselves out, and a decaying homestead has poetic charm only to passing travellers. Every-day life has its indispensabilities. But nobody cares that one’s house should be new any more than that one’s parents should be young. If they are young they are less entirely ours. They feel a right to an existence of their own, whereas later, our life is their life, and that is all that we ask of them, for we are not exacting.