The Performed Culture Trap — A Room with a View

Music leaves Lucy wanting something large, and the open platform of an electric tram is the thing she is not allowed. Charlotte has already explained why. A lady inspires other people. She does not step into the fight herself. So Lucy goes to Alinari's and buys the photographs she had been talked out of, Botticelli's Birth of Venus among them, the nude Charlotte called a pity. Nearly seven lire later she is still shut in. Nothing ever happens to me, she thinks, crossing the Piazza Signoria while the palace tower burns like gold.

Two Italians by the Loggia are quarrelling over five lire. They spar. One is struck on the chest, bends towards Lucy as if he had a message, and blood runs from his mouth. The crowd carries him to the fountain. George Emerson is a few steps off, looking at her across the empty place, and then the square seems to fall. She wakes in the Uffizi arcade in his arms. She says she can walk home alone, sends him back for the photographs, and runs the moment he turns. He stops her. If she were fit to go, she would go openly. The man is probably dead.

On the way to the pension she talks easily about the murder, and about the killer who tried to kiss the dying man before giving himself up. At the Arno, George throws her photographs into the river. They were covered with blood, and they frightened him. Something tremendous has happened, he says, and it is not exactly that a man has died. She asks him not to mention how foolish she has been. He agrees, and misses the second favour she cannot name. She says how quickly a person returns to the old life. He says he does not. He will probably want to live. Lucy stays at the parapet, listening to the river turn into a tune.