The Authenticity Awakening — A Room with a View

Mrs Honeychurch takes Lucy and Cecil to a neighbourhood garden party so that people can see her daughter marrying a presentable man. He looks distinguished beside her, until coffee goes over Lucy's figured silk. Mother and daughter go indoors to have the frock treated, and Cecil is left with the dowagers. On the drive home he calls the afternoon disastrous. An engagement is not public property, a waste place where every outsider may shoot a vulgar sentiment. Lucy asks why he did not escape to tennis. He does not play in public. The romance he claims is that of the Inglese Italianato, and he quotes the proverb that such a man is a devil incarnate. She does not know it. There are, he says, irremovable barriers between himself and these people. Mrs Honeychurch parks her card-case on her lap and draws the fence. This is me. That is Windy Corner. The rest of the pattern is other people. Fences are fences, especially when they stand in the same place. Lucy laughs. Cecil cannot see why.

Wanting to take his side, Lucy says the clergyman she does hate is Mr Eager, who told them an old man at the pension had murdered his wife. Cecil asks why she is sure. Eager would never come to the point: he said the man had practically murdered her, in the sight of God. What was the name? Harris, says Lucy, without a pause. The carriage reaches Summer Street, and the two ugly villas that arrived in the same week as the engagement. Albert is lived in. Cissie is to let. Sir Harry Otway cannot turn out Miss Flack, almost bedridden and, he whispers, so very vulgar. Cecil tells him to turn her out, then hopes he will get a tenant vulgar enough to notice. The place would be a paradise for a bank clerk. Lucy stops the joke and offers him spinsters instead: Miss Teresa and Miss Catharine Alan, met abroad, quite the right people.

Later, in the wood, Cecil is annoyed that she has never once been with him off the road since they were engaged. He had thought she felt more at home with him in a room. She laughs and says he is right. When she thinks of him, it is always in a room, with no view. He would rather she connected him with the open air. At a clearing she shows him the Sacred Lake, a puddle until heavy rain, where she bathed until Charlotte found her out. He asks for something he has never asked, not even on the day she agreed to marry him. Up to now he has never kissed her. May he now? Of course, she says. She cannot run at him. She gives her veil a business-like lift. His gold pince-nez is flattened between their faces. He knows the embrace has failed. In the version he would prefer, he rushes in like a labourer, and she reveres him ever after for his manliness.

They leave the pool in silence. He waits for a remark that will show her inmost thoughts. At last she speaks, and gravely. Emerson was the name, not Harris. That old man she told him about. The one Mr Eager was so unkind to. He could not know that this was the most intimate conversation they had ever had.