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E.M. Forster
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The Miss Alans really are coming to Cissie Villa. Mr Beebe has reassured Miss Teresa about the butcher, and Mrs Honeychurch already hates their if-ing and but-ing. She says the business has worn Lucy to a shadow. On the grass Lucy, Mr Beebe, Freddy, and thirteen-year-old Minnie are playing bumble-puppy, knocking tennis balls high so that they bounce. Cecil hears them from the house and does not come down. He hates the physical violence of the young. Freddy arrives with a slap on the back for Sir Harry, who has at last procured really desirable tenants. The name is not Alan. It is more like Anderson. Then he has it. Emerson. Friends of Cecil's. Sir Harry has just telegraphed.
Lucy had kept quiet while she thought the snub came from Sir Harry. She cries out when she hears it comes from Cecil. Mr Beebe covers for her. These will not be the Emersons from Florence, he says, a long cry from friends of Mr Vyse. Then he talks about those Emersons anyway. They filled the Miss Alans' room with violets, so ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful, and people declared the father had murdered his wife. Mrs Honeychurch shouts "Harris!" Lucy had used that name and never corrected it. She goes up the garden still red, hoping a word from Cecil will settle her.
He leans from the smoking-room window in high spirits. He has won a great victory for the Comic Muse. Freddy has only heard the outline. The whole joke is where Cecil met the tenants: in the National Gallery, in the Umbrian Room, absolute strangers admiring Luca Signorelli, stupidly, he says. They had been to Italy. The father wanted a cottage. The son would come at weekends. Cecil took their address, found they were not actual blackguards, and wrote to Sir Harry to score off his talk of decayed gentlewomen. Lucy says it is not fair. She has probably met them. He talks of democracy and of classes mixing. She snaps that he does not know what the word means, blames him for undoing her work and making her look ridiculous, calls it disloyal, and leaves.
Temper, he thinks. No. Worse than temper: snobbishness. She had not minded while she believed his own smart friends were replacing the Miss Alans. These new tenants might be of value educationally. He would tolerate the father and draw out the son, who was silent. In the interests of the Comic Muse and of Truth, he would bring them to Windy Corner.
Controlling where people live is one way taste becomes a cage dressed as concern. Cecil steers the Emersons into Cissie Villa, thinking he controls the chessboard of neighbors.
When someone arranges your proximity, ask what fear of spontaneity they are managing.
This chapter
She calls him naughty and says she must forgive him: the Miss Alans are a little tiresome, and she would rather have nice friends of his. She does not yet know the tenants' name. The joke is easy to pardon while it still looks like taste, and her preference gives the arrival her consent.
Continue this thoughtA Woman Who Must Not Have a StoryLucy's carefully constructed world is about to face an unexpected disruption that will force her to confront the growing doubts she's been trying to suppress. A surprise visitor brings uncomfortable reminders of Italy and the person she used to be..
What this chapter proves — the pattern beneath the scene
In this chapter, the lesson is Choosing the Wrong Person.
The card below names the pattern this chapter proves — carry it with you into the original text.
Choosing the Wrong Person
In the National Gallery Cecil meets the Emersons and, to amuse himself at the neighbors' expense, installs them at Cissie Villa. He is being a humourist. He has no idea he has moved the one man who can undo the engagement to within a walk of Windy Corner.
Key Insight
Cecil treats people as pieces in an arrangement. The arrangement then produces a life he did not intend, because the pieces have histories he never bothered to learn.
Chapter 10
The society out of which Cecil proposed to rescue Lucy was perhaps no very splendid affair, yet it was more splendid than her antecedents entitled her to. Her father, a prosperous local solicitor, had built Windy Corner, as a speculation at the time the district was opening up, and, falling in love with his own creation, had ended by living there himself. Soon after his marriage the social atmosphere began to alter. Other houses were built on the brow of that steep southern slope and others, again, among the pine-trees behind, and northward on the chalk barrier of the downs.…
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Other theme-by-theme analyses from this book.
Book Greece with the Miss Alans the night she breaks with Cecil, then sit by the Rectory fire while Mr. Emerson names the muddle.
Let Charlotte pack for Rome after the violets, then come home to a mother who wants a name she can say at tea.
Watch Cecil install the Emersons at Cissie Villa as a joke, then hear him read Miss Lavish's stolen kiss as drawing-room sport.
Take the Arno after Charlotte refuses the Emersons' rooms, then decide, back in Surrey, whether that window was only Italy.
Play Beethoven until Beebe asks the question, then faint in the Signoria and find George already carrying you to the river.
Deep diving the literary elements.
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