“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’.”