would ask, gently:

"Why do you always talk so unkindly of Addie?"

And then the three boys laughed and teased Marietje with being in love
with "the Baron."

But Marietje, who was sixteen, shrugged her shoulders, feeling grown-up
already: in a year's time, she was going to boarding-school, near
Cleves. No, she, who was sixteen, was not in love with a little cousin
of thirteen, with a child; but she thought him a nice boy all the same.
The three brothers and their friends had never danced, or talked, or
bicycled with her, or paid her any attention, whereas Addie behaved like
a gallant young cavalier. In that noisy, fussy, bawling household, the
girl had always been a little fragile, a little pale, a little quiet,
like a small, gentle alien that could not cope with the hard voices of
Mamma and the sisters and the rough horseplay of the brothers; and Addie
talked so nicely, so pleasantly, so politely, so gallantly, so very
differently from Chris and Piet and Jaap.

"The Italian wasn't here last Sunday."

"Then he's sure to come to-day."

"He always comes once a fortnight."

"That's the Italian fashion."

"Why do you boys always call Addie the Italian?" asked Marietje.

Now the three burst with laughing:

"That's nothing to do with you."

"Little girls shouldn't ask questions."

"I think it a silly nickname," said Marietje, "and it means nothing."

They burst out laughing again, full of importance and worldly wisdom.

"That's because you don't know."

"If you knew, you'd think it witty enough."

"It's a damned witty nickname."

"Chris, what language!"

"So you want to know why Addie is an Italian?"

She shrugged her shoulders, played the grown-up sister:

"I think you're silly, just like children. That nickname means nothing."

They burst with laughter once more:

"Don't you know what they do in Italy?"

"In Rome?"

She looked at them, her louts of brothers; she vaguely remembered
incautiously-whispered remarks about Aunt Constance, about the time when
she was still the wife of the Netherlands minister at Rome, of that old
uncle De Staffelaer whom she had never known.

"Well, look here: what do you think the name means?..."

She grew uncomfortable, fearing that they were suggesting something
improper which she did not understand:

"I don't know," she said, "and I don't care."

"Then you shouldn't call it a silly name."

But now Marietje was really interested and so she asked Caroline, a