Mrs. van Does repeated: "Engaged!" CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Doddie was rapt into the seventh heaven of delight when Van Oudijck told her that Addie had asked her hand in marriage; and, when she heard that mamma had been her advocate, she embraced Léonie boisterously, with the emotional spontaneity of her temperament, once more surrendering to the attraction which Léonie had exercised upon her for years. Doddie now at once forgot everything that had annoyed her in the excessive intimacy between mamma and Addie, when he used to hang over her chair and whisper to her. She had never believed what now and again she had heard, because Addie had always assured her that it was not true. And she was ever so happy that she was going to live with Addie, he and she together, at Patjaram. For Patjaram was her ideal of what a home should be. The big house, full of sons and daughters and children and animals, on all of whom the same kindness and cordiality and boredom were lavished, while behind those sons and daughters shone the halo of their Solo descent: the big house built on to the sugar factory was to her the ideal residence; and she felt akin with all its little traditions: the spices, crushed and ground by a babu squatting behind her chair, while she sat at lunch, represented to her the supreme indulgence of the palate; the races at Ngadjiwa, attended by the leisurely dawdling procession of all those women, with the babus behind them, carrying the handkerchief, the scent-bottle, the opera-glasses, were her non plus ultra of elegance; she loved the old dowager raden-aju; and she had given herself to Addie, entirely, without reserve, from the first moment of seeing him, when she was a little girl of thirteen and he a boy of eighteen. It was because of him that she had resisted with all her energy whenever papa proposed to send her to Europe, to boarding-school in Brussels; because of him she had never cared for any place except Labuwangi, Ngadjiwa or Patjaram; because of him she was prepared to live and die at Patjaram.