kind and interesting, but she had queer ideas, such as that a little girl might be afraid of big horses and that boys—not girls—climbed trees and that one should never go bare-headed into the sunlight. Ethel's later visit was memorable chiefly because it was at the château that she first met her uncle Lucas, of Chicago, and aunt Myra and her cousins, Julia and Bennet. They took Ethel back to America with them and brought her to Chicago; thus she met her uncle John and aunt Margaret and her grandfather and grandmother.
She was eight, then, and quite able to understand that such a delay in making the family acquaintance was not customary. And the separation of her father from her mother's immediate family was made more marked—rather than less so—by the circumstances that he was on terms of close friendship with her mother's cousin, Oliver, who, like her father, had as little as possible to do with the other Cullens. Cousin Oliver had to have business relations with them, as the whole family owned land and mines together; but he and his wife never visited at uncle Lucas's or uncle John's.
The cause was not to be inquired about in Chicago, Ethel understood. But at home in Wyoming, she used to ask her father about it all.
"Why, we couldn't get along together, dearie; so we stopped trying," was all he ever would say. "But you mustn't have trouble with your mother's people, whom you love and who love you."
Ethel recognized this for an evasion; and she believed that when she was older, he would tell her more. But if he had intended to, he did not; and Ethel found herself accustomed to accept the strange situation.
