The Correctness Trap — A Room with a View

Lucy wakes in the room they have gained: red tiles, a painted ceiling, the Arno under the window, and a street full of soldiers, a tram, and white bullocks. Charlotte comes in, scolds the unlocked door, and they start the usual argument about which of them will go out. Miss Lavish cuts through it. She will take Lucy to Santa Croce by a dirty back way, and if Lucy brings luck they will have an adventure. Baedeker, she says, only touches the surface. The true Italy is found by watching.

On the walk, Italy keeps slipping. They talk Radical politics and Surrey, and Lucy admits the family has thirty acres near Summer Street. Miss Lavish is not put off. They lose the church whose tower they could see from the pension, and when Lucy wants to ask the way, Miss Lavish calls that cowardly and takes the guidebook. For one moment Lucy stands in the Square of the Annunziata in front of the terra-cotta babies. Miss Lavish drags her on. They reach Santa Croce at last. The Emersons are going in too, and Miss Lavish calls them cows walking through her Italy. Then she bolts across the square after an old man she calls her local-colour box, and vanishes down a side street with Lucy's Baedeker.

Inside, the church is cold and like a barn. Lucy will not admire a tomb until someone tells her it is the one Ruskin praised. A little boy falls on a bishop carved in the floor. Mr Emerson picks him up, calls the bishop hateful, and sends him out to kiss his hand to the sun. The child's mother sets him on his feet, and Emerson says she has done more than all the relics. Lucy tries to thank him for the rooms in Charlotte's careful voice. He tells her to stop pretending to be cross and say which part of the church she wants. George leads her to the chapel where a clergyman is telling his flock to worship Giotto and the faith that built Santa Croce. Emerson shouts that faith means the workmen were not paid, and that a fat man in blue is shooting into the sky like a balloon. The party walks out. It is the Reverend Cuthbert Eager. George says his father is kind because he loves people, and they find him out and take offence. Lucy answers that a kind act should be done with tact. George throws his head up. Tact is the wrong word.

Left with her, Mr Emerson says George is unhappy because things will not fit. He asks Lucy, nearer the boy's age, to try to understand him, and he quotes a poem about life blown together out of the wind. Beside the everlasting Why, he says, there is a Yes. Lucy laughs, because a young man sad about the universe sounds absurd, and tells the father to find his son a hobby, the way the piano settles her and stamp-collecting once settled her brother. Perhaps Italy bores him. Try the Alps. Emerson's face falls, and he touches her hand. George comes over the tombstones and says only, "Miss Bartlett." The new ease drops away. Lucy tells them she is thoroughly happy, that there is enough sorrow without inventing it, and that Santa Croce is a wonderful church. Then she goes to her cousin.