The Awakening Trap — A Room with a View

In August the new carpet at Windy Corner has to be protected, so the drawing-room curtains are pulled shut and the Sussex Weald stays outside. Freddy, nineteen, works at a manual of anatomy, with a bone on the piano. His mother writes to Mrs Vyse and keeps parting the curtains to see whether Lucy and Cecil are still in the garden. This is his third request. Freddy wishes she had finished it in Italy. If she had said no properly, she would not be saying it again. Cecil has asked Freddy's permission as well as their mother's, and wanted to hear that Freddy was wild with joy for Lucy and for the house. Freddy answered no. He does not hate Cecil. He does not like him. Mr Beebe has called Mr Vyse an ideal bachelor, better detached, like himself.

Cecil cannot bear a room kept dark to save the furniture. He twitches the curtains open. Lucy is sitting on a rustic seat at the edge of the view, as if the garden were a green carpet hung over the Weald. He tells them first in Italian, then flushes when he says it in English. She has accepted him. Mrs Honeychurch welcomes him to the family and waves at the furniture. Freddy offers a hand stained yellow from his chemicals. Lucy comes across the lawn smiling, as if she were about to suggest tennis, sees her brother's face, and takes him in her arms. He tells her to steady on.

Mr Beebe comes for tea before evening service and finds Cecil in a contrary mood, listing the maids' faults and calling Freddy the sort of man who has made England what she is. Lucy, Cecil says, has no faults. Mr Beebe has a theory he has carried since Florence. She plays wonderfully and lives quietly, and one day the wall between music and life will give way. In his Italian diary she is a kite, with Miss Bartlett holding the string. The string never broke, or he would have heard Charlotte fall. It has broken now, Cecil says, and immediately hears how vain that sounds. He means that she is going to marry him. Mr Beebe is sorry. He had not known they were close, and would not have talked so freely. He blesses them, asks that they be good and happy, and then asks for his tea. Mrs Honeychurch wants to know how he dares be serious at Windy Corner.

The seriousness does not hold. Freddy whistles the wedding march and calls Cecil the Fiasco, the family pun on fiancé. Away in their own rooms, Mr Beebe and even Freddy might be critical again. In the room, the engagement carries them with it. Lucy and Cecil join the rite, and wait, as earnest worshippers should, for the disclosure of some holier shrine of joy.