clearly, even at a distance; the window-frames were bright with fresh paint, dazzling cream-colour or pale brown; the blinds, neatly lowered in front of the shining plate-glass windows, were let down in each house precisely the same depth, as though mathematically measured; and the houses concealed their inner lives very quietly behind the straight, nicely-balanced lace curtains. And this was very characteristic, that above each gable there jutted a flagstaff, held aslant with iron pins, the staff painted a bright red, white and blue—the national colours—as though wound about with ribbons, with a freshly-gilded knob at the top. All those flagstaffs—a forest of staffs, with their iron pins, for ever aslant on the gables—waited patiently to hoist their colours, to wave their bunting, twice a year, for the Queen and her mother, the Regent.
Marietje looked out. It was May; and the chestnuts in the grass-plots tried to outstretch and unfurl their soft, pale-green fans, now folded and bent back against their stalks. But a mad wind whirled through the street, which was like a courtyard of opulence, and the wind scourged the still furled chestnut-fans. The girl looked at them compassionately as they were whipped to and fro by the wind, the eager young leaves which, full of vernal life and pride of youth, were trying hard to unfold. The tender leaves were full of hope, because yesterday the sun had shone, after the rain, out of a flood-swept sky; and they thought that their leafy days were beginning, their life of leaves budding out from
