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