There had been a lot discount ugg boots of noise out in the hallway, and perhaps this had stopped George from hearing, because there was no response. Tommy asked suddenly: "Is that why Miss Lucy left?"
     For a while I thought Miss Emily, whose attention was on what was going on in the hallway, hadn't heard him. She leaned back in her wheelchair and began moving it gradually towards the door. There were so many little coffee tables and chairs there didn't seem a way through. I was about to get up and clear a path, when she stopped suddenly.
     "Lucy Wainright," she said. "Ah yes. We had a little trouble with her." She paused, then adjusted her wheelchair back to face discount ugg boots Tommy. "Yes, we had a little trouble with her. A disagreement. But to answer your question, Tommy. The disagreement with Lucy Wainright wasn't to do with what I've just been telling you. Not directly, anyway. No, that was more, shall we say, an internal matter."
     I thought she was going to leave it at that, so I asked: "Miss Emily, if it's all right, we'd like to know about it, about what happened with Miss Lucy."
     Miss Emily raised her eyebrows. "Lucy Wainright? She was important to you? Forgive me, dear students, I'm forgetting again. Lucy wasn't with us for long, so for us she's just a peripheral figure buy cheap uggs online in our memory of Hailsham. And not an altogether happy one. But I appreciate, if you were there during just those years..." She laughed to herself and seemed to be remembering something. In the hall, Madame was telling the men off really loudly, but Miss Emily now seemed to have lost interest. She was going through her memories with a look of concentration. Finally she said: "She was a nice enough girl, Lucy Wainright. But after she'd been with us for a while, she began to have these ideas. She thought you students had to be made more aware. More aware of what lay ahead of you, ugg boots for girls who you were, what you were for. She believed you should be given as full a picture as possible. That to do anything less would be somehow to cheat you. We considered her view and concluded she was mistaken."
     "Why?" Tommy asked. "Why did you think that?"
     "Why? She meant well, I'm sure of that. I can see you were fond of her. She had the makings of an excellent guardian. But what she was wanting to do, it was too theoretical. We had run Hailsham for many years, we had a sense of what could work, what was best for the students in the long run, beyond Hailsham. discount ugg boots Lucy Wainright was idealistic, nothing wrong with that. But she had no grasp of practicalities. You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn't. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you. I suppose you could even call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods. Lucy was well-meaning enough. But if she'd had her way, your ugg boots australia happiness at Hailsham would have been shattered. Look at you both now! I'm so proud to see you both. You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn't be who you are today if we'd not protected you. You wouldn't have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn't have lost yourselves in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing what lay in store for each of you? You would have told us it was all pointless, and how could we have argued with you? So she had to go."