"It'll be different with you."
She was driving him by way of Broomhill, for that was another place which had fired his imagination, though to her it too was a tedious hole. Martin could not forget the Broomhill of old days—the glamour of taverns and churches and streets lay over the few desolate houses and ugly little new church which huddled under the battered sea-wall. Great reedy pools still remained from the thirteenth century floods, brackish on the flat seashore, where the staked keddle nets showed that the mackerel were beginning to come into Rye Bay.
"Nothing but fisher-folk around here," said Joanna contemptuously—"you'll see 'em all in the summer, men, women and children, with heaps of mackerel that they pack in boxes for London and such places—so much mackerel they get that there's nothing else ate in the place for the season, and yet if you want fish-guts for manure they make you pay inland prices, and do your own carting."
"I think it's a delicious place," he retorted, teasing her, "I've a mind to bring you here for our honeymoon."
"Martin, you'd never I You told me you were taking me to foreign parts, and I've told Mrs. Southland and Mrs. Furnese and Maudie Vine and half a dozen more all about my going to Paris and seeing the sights and hearing French spoken."
"Yes—perhaps it would be better to go abroad; Broomhill is wonderful, but you in Paris will be more wonderful than Broomhill—even in the days before the flood."
"I want to see the Eiffel Tower—where they make the lemonade—and I want to buy myself something really chick in the way of hats."
"Joanna—do you know the hat which suits you best?"
"Which?" she asked eagerly, with some hope for the feathers.
"The straw hat you tie on over your hair when you go out to the chickens first thing in the morning."