From 'A Princess of Thule'
She asked if they were lords who owned those beautiful houses built up on the hill, and half-smothered among lilacs and ash-trees and rowan-trees and ivy.
"My darling," Lavender had said to her, "if your papa were to come and live here, he could buy half a dozen of these cottages, gardens and all. They are mostly the property of well-to-do shopkeepers. If this little place takes your fancy, what will you say when you go South--when you see Wimbledon and Richmond and Kew, with their grand old commons and trees? Why, you could hide Oban in a corner of Richmond Park!"
"And my papa has seen all these places?"
"Yes. Don't you think it strange he should have seen them all, and known he could live in any of them, and then gone away back to Borva?"
"But what would the poor people have done if he had never gone back?"
"Oh, some one else would have taken his place."
"And then, if he were living here, or in London, he might have got tired, and he might have wished to go back to the Lewis and see all the people he knew; and then he would come among them like a stranger, and have no house to go to."
Then Lavender said, quite gently:--
"Do you think, Sheila, you will ever tire of living in the South?"