‘So I should suppose, since you were only six years old, at the utmost.’ ‘But Uncle Maurice always was under a cloud, wasn’t he, especially at Beechcroft, where I never saw him or his wife in the holidays except once, when I believe she was not at all liked, and was thought to be very proud, and stuck-up, and pretentious.’ ‘But was she just nobody? not a lady?’ cried Gillian. ‘Aunt Emily always called her, ‘“Poor thing.”’ ‘Perhaps she did the same by Aunt Emily,’ returned Hal. ‘And I am sure I have heard Aunt Ada say that she wasn’t a lady; and Aunt Jane that she had all sorts of discreditable connections.’ ‘Come now, Gill, if you chatter so, how is mamma to get a word in between?’ ‘I’m afraid we have all been hard on her, poor thing!’ ‘There now, mamma has done it, just like Aunt Emily!’ ‘Anybody would be poor who got killed in a glacier!’ ‘No, but one doesn’t say poor when people are--nice.’ ‘When I said poor,’ now put in Lady Merrifield, ‘it was not so much that I was thinking of her death as of her having come into a family where nobody welcomed her, and I really do not suppose it was her fault.’ ‘Moreover, she seemed to do very well without a welcome,’ added Hal. ‘Who is interrupting now?’ cried Gillian, ‘but was she a lady?’ ‘I never saw her, you know,’ said the mother; ‘but from all I ever heard of her, I should think she was, and cleverer and more highly educated than any of us.’ ‘Yes,’ said Hal, ‘that was the kind of pretension that exasperated them all at Beechcroft, especially Uncle William.’ ‘I wonder if Dolores will have it!’ said Gillian. ‘I suppose she will know much more than we do.’