A Room with a View

Mrs. Honeychurch hosts a garden party to show off Lucy's engagement to Cecil - naturally she wants everyone to see her daughter is marrying a presentable man. Cecil looks distinguished beside Lucy, his slim figure and fair face properly responding to conversation. The dowagers are pleased. Then disaster: coffee is spilled on Lucy's figured silk dress. While she and her mother go inside to have it treated by a sympathetic maid, Cecil is left alone with the stuffy guests. When Lucy returns, he's changed - irritable and contemptuous. "Do you go to much of this sort of thing?" he asks coldly. Cecil despises Surrey society, these provincial garden parties, these people who talk about nothing but tennis and who should marry whom. He positions himself as superior - "Inglese Italianato," an Italian Englishman, sophisticated and cosmopolitan. "There are certain irremovable barriers between myself and them," he declares. He wants Lucy to see herself as equally above it all, rescued by him from middle-class mediocrity. They walk to a pool surrounded by rhododendrons. Cecil fantasizes about being heroic - what if Lucy had been drowning? He should have rushed in and saved her, she would have revered him for his manliness. He waits for her to say something revealing her inmost thoughts. Finally she speaks: "Emerson was the name, not Harris. That old man I told you about. The one Mr. Eager was so unkind to." Lucy is still thinking about Italy, about the Emersons. Cecil has no idea who she means. The narrator delivers the devastating line: "He could not know that this was the most intimate conversation they had ever had." Because she's not thinking about him at all.