The Authentic Disruption — A Room with a View

Charlotte is perfectly pleasant about Lucy's adventure. The short account is enough, and she praises George's courtesy. She and Miss Lavish had an adventure of their own at the customs. No friend saw Lucy in the Piazza or afterwards on the embankment. Mr Beebe notices her eyes at dinner and decides, again, that it is too much Beethoven. He thinks she is ready for an adventure, not that she has had one. She is used to having her thoughts confirmed or contradicted. Not knowing which she is owed is the hard part.

At breakfast Mr Beebe invites her to walk to the Torre del Gallo with the Emersons. Charlotte, who hates that walk in the rain, thinks Lucy should go and offers to shop alone. Lucy refuses with real warmth, then blushes, because the warmth was fear of meeting George. On the river Charlotte stops at the parapet where the photographs went in, and wishes Freddy and Mrs Honeychurch could see the water. Then she leads Lucy into the Piazza Signoria. For a moment the girl understands ghosts. Miss Lavish is already standing on the place of the murder with the morning paper. Yesterday's catastrophe has given her a novel. The men quarrelled over a five-franc note. She will put a young lady named Leonora in its place, and call the plot love, murder, abduction, revenge. She has been collecting since eight. Lucy's hope is not to be written into it.

Mr Eager joins them and asks them to drive in the hills, the view a painter liked better than the usual look from Fiesole. Lucy's thanks stay thin until she hears that Mr Beebe is coming. In a shop the chaplain talks of Mr Emerson: a labourer's son, once a mechanic, then a writer for the Socialistic press, then an advantageous marriage. The wife is dead. He wonders that the man dares look him in the face after Santa Croce. Lucy asks what he means. Exposure, he says, and then, angry that she will not fill in the rest: that man murdered his wife. How? To all intents and purposes. In the sight of God. She loses her nerve and says she is not defending them. They are nothing to her. Charlotte buys a model of the Leaning Tower and gets them into the street.

Later Lucy calls the drive a bother. It is the same plan they already had with Mr Beebe, and each person is paying. Charlotte sees a worse snag. Mr Beebe has also asked Miss Lavish, and Mr Eager finds her too unconventional. At the English bank the letters from home are full of wrong-coloured crocuses, a new parlour-maid, and cottages spoiling Summer Street. Mrs Vyse and her son have gone to Rome. Lucy suddenly says she is sick of Florence. Charlotte promised the ends of the earth. They should leave for the Vyses' hotel tomorrow. Charlotte laughs and asks what would become of the drive. They walk on through the stony square, treating the idea as a joke.