HET BY MIJ EENE VISITE AFLEGGEN.
Seeing, however, that dear was lief or dierbaar, I could easily make out a form of friendly address:—‘Dierbare mijnheer’ or briefly ‘Dierbaar.’
It was a toss up, indeed whether to take the stiff title Hooggeachte Heer (for Hoogedelgestrenge Heer seemed too much of a good thing for a note about an umbrella) or this more affectionate but somewhat doubtful Dierbaar!
I finally decided on a combination, one at the beginning and one at the end.
I sailed along quite comfortably until I arrived at his ‘doing me the honour to call’. This required hammering out; and when I had tortured myself a long time over it, here is what I got: ‘wanneer gij mij vereerdet door het bij mij eene visite afleggen’. Dreadfully round-about, you perceive! So I just fell back upon brevity, and trusted to luck to carry me safely through. ‘Op mij te roepen’, sounded terse and likely; and I chose it to avoid worse pitfalls with door and the infinitive.
As ‘I beg’ had a brusque ring, I made it a trifle mellower and more courteous by the helpful and familiar ‘verschoon mij’. ‘Verschoon mij, dat ik bedel,’ I could not improve on that.
But the proper division of ‘overhandigen’ into its component parts was not easy.
VERTROUWELIJK OR WAARACHTIG.
To get the right ‘hang’ of this sentence, I forcibly detached the ‘over’, and dragged this harmless voorzetsel well forward so as not to impede the action of its own particular verb, when you got so far. This much improved the rhythm; and I gave myself some freedom in the phrasing to keep up the style.