Her parents had always regarded her as a sort of stepchild. There was Elaine, her elder sister, docile, petite, with fair looks and a proper dot, married at eighteen and mother of two babies; but Virginie was twenty and unwed. Although I did not know her until 1914, I can fancy the picture in the ancient moated castle of Drie Toren two years before when Virginie faced the old Baron, her father, and declared her independence of parental restraints of all sorts. The old Baron, bearded like a Numidian lion, had a special vocabulary for matters which concerned his unmarried daughter. “Incroyable! pÉnible! triste! terrible! effrayante! bÊte!”—I heard them dozens of times a day—and the shy, wilted floweret of a Baroness, her mother, sat with hands placidly folded, waiting for the final catastrophe which was sure to overwhelm her “pauvre Virginie.”

La Baronne Virginie was delighted to tell me of the famous interview with her father. She told it with shrieks and giggles, between puffs from one of my strongest cigarettes, her cold, gray-blue eyes—inherited from some merciless Viking ancestor who had once harried the coasts of Flanders—dancing with delight, and her bright golden hair waving as she tossed her head to give point to the jest.

“‘Mais, ma chÉrie,’ il m’a dit.

“‘Mais, mon pÈre,’ j’ai dit.... The devil! I forget always and speak French. That morning I was very angry, so I slid down the banisters and shrieked with the top of my breath, and there was my father at the foot of the stair, like this!” She made an adorable caricature of the leonine astonishment of her father at sight of the apparition of his daughter, her foot caught in her skirt, kicking vigorously to free herself and spreading tatters of lace petticoat over the Chinese carpet. “‘Come here,’ he roared, as if I were a servant. ‘Come here, cher Papatje, s’il te plaÎt. I have something to say,’ I answer very respectfully, as a Belgian girl must always speak: ‘I will not marry. I will not worship some man like Jules. (Jules is my brother-in-law. He has red hair and a wart on his nose. Ugh!) I will not have babies. I will not be as Elaine. No, no, no, no, no, I will not. I am going to England to be a suf-fer-a-gette. I will burn churches and bite people. I hate men!’”

“But do you hate us, really?” I interrupted.

“Of course!” The light of her eyes was like the light on Swiss glaciers. “I hate all men—you especially.”

I was hurt, and showed it.

“Ha! I do,” she repeated, following up her advantage. “And I hate my father—enough, not much, just a little. ‘Oufff!’ he says to me, ‘what for a person is this my daughter! Have I not give you all in the world, miserable one?’ ‘No,’ I answer. ‘Freedom? No.’ ‘Freedom!’ he says. ‘Yes, freedom,’ I answer again. ‘It is the century of the woman. We must have freedom.’ (I got that from an American book, but I did not tell him. He was so troubled already.)

“So next day I went to England, and in England I burned one church and bit two people.”

It was I who named her DoÑa Quixote. For all her Viking eyes she was a perfect Spanish type, such a type as one occasionally finds nowadays in villages of the Dutch Province of Zeeland or in the Belgian Provinces of East Flanders and Antwerp, almost the sole reminders of the days when the Dons lorded it in the Low Countries. She was not brunette, but a Spanish blonde, with a magnificent complexion burnished on the cheeks, straight, aristocratic nose, and jeweled mouth. The oval of her face was positively Mediterranean, and seeing her glorious hair I knew what the Elizabethan poets meant by singing of “golden wires.” She was adorable, perfect, and cold as frost.

“But, mademoiselle,” I began.

“Madame!” she interrupted. “Always call me madame.”

“Pardon, but why?”

“Never ask me the why of anything. It is because I choose. Isn’t that enough?”

“No,” I burst out angrily. “I’m a reasonable being, I’ll have you to know, and I must be treated reasonably. What the dickens——?”

She laughed suddenly and delightedly. “Ice, ice, I thought you were of ice. I thought all Americans were of ice, Monsieur. Good! You thaw. I shall tell you, because you know how to get angry like a Belgian.”

“Stop teasing me,” I muttered, ashamed, sorry, and indignant.

“At the convent school in Bruges where I went to school the nuns call us ‘madame’. It is a school for the petty nobility, you understand, so we are called ‘madame’ just as the little Princess Marie-Jose is called ‘Madame’ and not ‘Mademoiselle la Princesse.’ I like it.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“That is all one to me,” she responded calmly. “You are to call me ‘madame’.”

“I won’t. Not until you are married, and maybe I won’t even then. Maybe I’ll call you by your first name.”

She examined curiously my flushed face, stubborn, unhappy, disgusted with my own boorishness, but seeing no way out. Her cold gaze took in all that she wanted; noted that I was a fly in her spider-net; and she dimpled and thawed graciously. “Please!” she begged.

“Mademoiselle—er—er——” I stuttered, “do you know Spanish?”

“Not a word. But I have read ‘Don Quixote,’ of course.”

“DoÑa—that is Spanish for a noble lady. I shall call you DoÑa—DoÑa Quixote.”

“Wha-at?”

For the first and, I was about to say, the last time, I caught her off her guard, astonished, wounded, a bit angry. But the one word was all I wanted. It showed me I could bully her. That word had been warm and human, utterly unlike the icy flood which normally came from her lips. “DoÑa Quixote!” I repeated blandly.

“You shall do nothing of the sort. Don Quixote was a madman.”

“Yes, and you are a madwoman. You won’t listen to the people who love you.”

“You are not to say that word to me again.”

“What word?”

“That word! You know—that word.”

“DoÑa?”

“The other one: the one that begins with l and has four letters!”