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As we drew nearer to Broek-in-Waterland, the landscape, already fragrant with daintiness, began to tidy itself anew, out of deference to Broek's reputation. The smallest and rudest wooden houses on the canal banks had frilled their windows with stiff white curtains and tied them with ribbon. Railings had painted themselves blue or green, and smartened their tips with white.
He advanced to her, without the needless ceremony of touching his hat, eagerly asking how she had acquired her new accomplishment? But the brain crowned by the big red hat that had come from the Maison Cluny, and cost a hundred francs, and had been smartened up with a bunch of pink and yellow artificial roses, and three imitation ostrich-tips of a cheerful blue, did not comprehend.
So Tom knew not what to say or do; and not knowing, determined to wait on Providence, smartened himself as best he could, went up to the great house, and found Miss Mary. "I'll tell her. She will manage it somehow, if she is a woman; much more if she is an angel, as my father says."
He got into the car and sat by my side; and then some of the village women, who had smartened themselves up in their Sunday clothes, reached over and shook hands with me, speaking about things I had said and done as a child and had long forgotten. "Is it true?" they had asked each other. "Is he really, really coming?" "What does he like to eat, mother?" "What does he drink?" "What does he smoke?"
However, the thing's gone too far for me to draw back. It must depend upon the ladies. If they don't back out when they see my car, I won't." "To all intents and purposes it's my car now," said I. "You made her over to me before witnesses, and I think I shall have her smartened up with a bit of red paint and a crest." "If you try on anything like that, you can drive her yourself, for I won't.
"Well," she replied, "Venice seems to have smartened up a bit, but that Shylock is the same mean, grasping creature that he used to be." After all, only a feminine mind can be truly broadminded and make a correct deduction of a whole from a knowledge of a part. Said a certain lady in a shop: "I want a pair of pants for my sick husband." "What size?" asked the clerk.
When last I saw the place, thus smartened and secured, with its hair in curl-papers and its feet in patent-leathers, I turned from it in anger and disgust, and could almost have wept. I suppose that to those who knew it in no other guise, it may still have beauty. No parish councils, beneficent and shrewd, can obscure the lustre of the waters or compress the vastness of the sky.
In one flash of vision Reuben saw the furniture polished and comfortably arranged, the room smartened up and looking its best with a blazing fire and a singing kettle, and a cozy meal ready laid for two people; and then all they would have to say to one another on his part much to hear and little to tell, for his life had jogged on at a very commonplace trot, his business neither better nor worse, but still, with the aid of the little sum his more than rigid economy had enabled him to save, they might make a fair start, free from all debt and able to pay their way.
So, before it had well begun, the maternal lecture ended impotently in the wash-hand basin. When the boy had been smartened and brushed up, Mrs. Thorpe took him on her lap; and suppressing a strong desire to kiss him on both his round, shining cheeks, said these words: "I want you to learn your lesson, because you will please me by obeying your papa.
He saw this with shrinking. He walked wearily, looking older than he was in the pathos of loss. Life with her meant an indefinitely prolonged youth, an ecstasy he had not dreamt of, the well-being of his whole nature. He walked along moodily, thinking how he would have started afresh, smartened up Undern, worked hard, given his children his and Hazel's a good education, become more sober.
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