The boys and girls around us were neglected. We only cared for whist, which we played from the time we got up until we went to bed, with no other variation that I remember except sea-bathing and Captain Marryat's novels. As none of the boys or girls shared our desperate passion, it followed that I and my three smaller step-sisters became inseparable, and held all our fellows who did not live for whist to be poor dull creatures. Once we made part of a children's gathering at Killiney Hill, but after the cold chicken, jelly, cakes, and lemonade, we speedily found life intolerable without a pack of cards. "I say, Angela," whispered Birdie to me, when I was musing of honours and the odd trick, "I've brought them. Let's go behind a tree and have a game." Now I always take a hand with pleasure because of that defunct vice; but, alas! I am compelled to own that I never played so well as at eleven. My next passion, for which Pauline this time was responsible, was genealogy. We invented a family called the L'Estranges and brought them over with the Conqueror. Where they had previously come from we did not ask. What did it matter? To come over with the Conqueror was, we knew, a certificate of chivalry. The chief, Walter, fought at the Battle of Hastings. We pictured him with golden locks, a bright and haughty visage, stern grey eyes that could look ineffably soft in a love-scene, and beautiful shining armour. We married him to a certain Saxon Edith, and down as far as the Battle of Bosworth Field, Walter and Edith were the favourite family names of the L'Estranges. To give piquancy to our most delightful game, and stimulate our imagination, we founded a cemetery of the L'Estranges. We made little wooden tombstones, on which we carved imaginary epitaphs of all the imaginary L'Estranges who had died since the Battle of Hastings. As we loathed old people in our dramatic history, except the aged lord who dies blessing a numerous progeny from time to time, all our resplendent heroes perished in romantic youth on the Spanish Main, on battle-fields, on the African coast; or rescuing Turkish princesses, or capturing Grecian isles; while their brides invariably faded away either of consumption or a broken heart at seventeen. The cemetery was peopled to excess by the time we got as far as the Battle of Bosworth Field, where the last hero fell in front of the enemy before he had time to marry the maiden of his choice. It is astonishing how little the average child approves of a natural death. The heroes must die by violence in the flower of youth, and the heroines must perish or pine away from unnatural causes on the threshold of maidenhood. Nineteen is even old and commonplace: the age of glory is seventeen.