Borrowed Shame Trap — A Room with a View

Lucy and Charlotte Bartlett sit down tired at the Pension Bertolini and find the landlady has broken her promise. They were to have south rooms together, looking over the Arno. They have north rooms on a courtyard, a long way apart. Over dinner each tries to give the first front room to the other. An old man across the table leans in. He has a view, and so does his son, George. They will swap. Charlotte thanks him with her mouth barely open and says it is out of the question. He hits the table and asks why. Women like a view. Men do not. George, not looking at the ladies, says there is nothing else to say. Lucy feels the quarrel has left the rooms behind.

The curtains open and Mr Beebe arrives, a clergyman they knew at Tunbridge Wells. He is about to take the living at Summer Street, near Lucy's house, Windy Corner. Lucy jumps up. The other guests decide the cousins are acceptable and bury them in advice about Fiesole, Prato, trams, and beggars. Miss Lavish, the clever lady, tells them to shake off respectability. George looks at her and goes back to his plate. He and his father are still outside that circle. When Lucy leaves she turns and gives them a small bow. George does not bow. He lifts his eyebrows and smiles across something.

In the drawing-room Charlotte tells Mr Beebe she cannot put her young cousin under an obligation to strangers. He says little harm would have come of accepting. Mr Emerson says what he means. He would not expect thanks, and he no more meant to oblige them than he meant to be polite. One of the Miss Alans adds that some people do things which are indelicate and, at the same time, beautiful. Charlotte cannot see how beauty and delicacy could differ. Mr Beebe comes back from the smoking-room with the offer made again. Lucy wants the rooms. Charlotte stays silent until he starts to apologise, then accepts in a voice the whole room can hear. The yes, she tells Lucy, must come from her, not from the girl. George brings the message, because his father is in his bath, and Charlotte's polite sentences come out backwards.

She takes the larger room, which had been George's, so Lucy will owe the father and not the son. Lucy opens her window on the lights in the river and the cypresses of San Miniato. Charlotte locks her shutters, searches the cupboards for secret doors, and finds a sheet of paper pinned over the washstand. On it is nothing but a huge question mark. She will not tear it up. She slides it between two pieces of blotting-paper, to keep it clean for young Mr Emerson, and goes to bed.