The Acceptable Misery Trap — A Room with a View

On a bright Saturday after the rains, Mr Beebe and Freddy cross the green to hinder the new people. Cissie Villa is blocked by a wardrobe the men could not get upstairs. Along the cornice an amateur hand has painted, "Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes." The sitting-room is books: Byron, A Shropshire Lad, The Way of All Flesh, Gibbon, and German that George reads. Freddy says Lucy came back from London yesterday, thicker than ever with Cecil, who is teaching her Italian and finding things in her playing that the family has never noticed.

George runs down and pushes them into the room without a word. Freddy, perhaps shy and perhaps thinking the face wants washing, greets him with "How d'ye do? Come and have a bathe." Mr Emerson follows more slowly. The Garden of Eden, he says, is not behind them. They will enter it when they no longer despise their bodies. He is glad Lucy is to marry, and glad of Mr Vyse, who met them by chance in the National Gallery and arranged this house. George has been working hard at his office. They are to bring him back to tea.

In the pine-wood Mr Beebe talks of coincidence. George says it is Fate. The twelve winds blow them. They settle nothing. Mr Beebe tells him to attribute nothing to Fate. He met Miss Honeychurch in Italy, and he met the man who is going to marry her in the National Gallery, looking at Italian art. The field was already narrow. George says Mr Beebe may call it Italy, if that makes him less unhappy.

The pond is only a pond, swollen over the grass. George wets his hair before he goes in, a sign of apathy, as if the water were a pail of soapsuds. Then the three of them forget Italy and Fate. George smiles, ducks the other two, and drives them out. They race, play at Indians in the bracken, and kick the bundles of clothes about. Mr Beebe remembers that he is in his own parish. People are coming: Mrs Honeychurch, Cecil, and Lucy, on their way to call on old Mrs Butterworth. Freddy drops a clerical waistcoat at their feet and dives into the bracken. George whoops in their faces and runs, still wearing Mr Beebe's hat. Cecil leads the women the wrong way. Mrs Honeychurch cannot stay shocked, and tells the boys to dry thoroughly. Lucy begs her to come away. George, barefoot and bare-chested, calls out, "Hullo, Miss Honeychurch! Hullo!" Mrs Honeychurch says to bow. Lucy bows. That night the water runs off. In the morning the pool has shrunk to its old size and lost its glory. It had been a call to the blood and to the relaxed will, a passing benediction whose influence did not pass.