“‘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.