the banks of the Danube. He adored her as a free spirit and in so doing won her heart in a way that no one had before. But her father (seemingly egged on by Barbara) took exception to his uncertain origins and the idea of his daughter settling in Europe for good and forbade her from seeing him again. Although distraught, the normally willful Virginia obeyed her beloved Ned (as she called him) and broke off the unofficial engagement. She kept a photo of Emil for some time afterward, but her independence ran only so far. She never saw her lover again, and was later to discover that he had probably perished in spring 1940, one of thousands of Polish officers executed in cold blood by Russia’s secret police during the Second World War and buried in mass graves in the forest at Katyn.
Once she got over her heartbreak, Virginia left Europe for home a very different woman from the one who had set sail in 1926. She carried with her not only a degree at last but a burning belief in female emancipation. Those three carefree years instilled in her a deep and abiding love of France and the freedoms its people had offered her. That passion was to withstand all the barbarity that was to come and drove her to put her life on the line to defend what she would call her “second country.” She had also honed her collection of five foreign languages—most usefully French and German, but also Spanish, Italian, and Russian—although she was never able to shake off her American drawl. She had become unusually well versed, however, in European culture, geography, and most of all, politics. When she was in Vienna she saw fascist groups triumph during outbreaks of bloody political unrest. On trips over the border she witnessed Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party rising fast in popularity on the back of his pledge to put Germany first, with his Nuremberg rallies becoming massive displays of Nazi paramilitary power. In nearby Italy, the dictator Benito Mussolini had declared war on democracy itself back in 1925, and had been building up a police state ever since. She was thus witness to the dark clouds of nationalism gathering across the horizon. Peace in Europe and Virginia’s intoxicating “belle vie de Paris” were already under threat.
Dindy returned home to Maryland and Boxhorn Farm in July 1929, shortly before much of what remained of the family fortune was wiped out in the Wall Street crash and the Depression that followed. Her brother, John, lost his job in the now beleaguered family construction and finance business, and the general gloom appears to have affected Virginia’s graduate studies in French and economics at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her attendance was erratic but her grades sufficient to apply to the State Department to become a professional diplomat, still her fervent dream. With the confidence of youth—plus her languages and extensive academic study—she expected to succeed in the requisite entrance exam. The fact that only six out of fifteen hundred Foreign Service officers were women should have been due warning. The rejection was quick and brutal. The high echelons of the State Department seemed unwilling to welcome women into their ranks, she told her friend Elbridge Durbrow, but refusing to countenance defeat she planned to “enter by the back door.”3
In the meantime, she tried to support her father as he lurched from one business calamity to another, agonizing over the plight of the thousands now out of work, and facing the prospect of his own ruin. On January 22, 1931, as he emerged from his office in downtown Baltimore, Ned collapsed on the pavement from a massive cardiac arrest and died a few hours later. His loss at just fifty-nine was a cruel blow to his family, and perhaps to Virginia most of all. He had doted on his daring young Dindy, indulging her fondness for traditionally male pursuits such as hunting, even buying his daughter her own gun. Now he had gone and so had much of the money. John and his wife and two children moved in with Barbara at Boxhorn Farm to cut costs, and Virginia was expected to live a quiet life with them. Such a claustrophobic arrangement was tolerable for only so long, however, and soon she was applying for jobs. After seven months stuck at home, by August 1931 Virginia was impatiently on her way to a clerk’s job in the American embassy