Chapter 15 — A Room with a View

The Sunday after Charlotte Bartlett's arrival: tennis party at Windy Corner. The Emersons are invited, along with other neighbors. Cecil immediately establishes his superiority by refusing to play - tennis is beneath him, too vulgar, too middle-class. While everyone else enjoys the game, Cecil lounges and makes cutting remarks. He picks up Miss Lavish's novel - ironically, the one she was writing in Florence - and begins reading aloud. The novel contains a scene eerily similar to Lucy's own experience in the Piazza Signoria, with a young English girl being carried from violence by a stranger. Cecil doesn't know he's reading Lucy's story.

He finds it all amusing, another chance to mock provincial tastes and romantic clichés. Lucy recognizes herself in the pages - Miss Lavish has turned her private trauma into fiction. The reading becomes excruciating. When they finally go in to tea, Lucy leads the way up the garden: Lucy, then Cecil following her, then George last. She thinks disaster is averted. But entering the shrubbery, Cecil realizes he's forgotten the book and goes back for it. In the narrow path, George must pass Lucy.

He doesn't speak. "No, " she gasps, and for the second time, George kisses her. This time on her home ground, surrounded by family, engaged to another man. Not in exotic Italy where passion might be blamed on foreign influence, but here in England where such things don't happen. The kiss is swift: "As if no more was possible, he slipped back." Cecil rejoins her. They reach the upper lawn alone.

But everything has changed. George has made his move, declared himself through action since Lucy refuses to hear words.