A Room with a View: Chapters 8–11

“I think things are coming to a head,” she observed, rather wanting her son’s opinion on the situation if she could obtain it without undue supplication.

Well educated, well endowed, and not deficient physically, he remained in the grip of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the medieval, with dimmer vision, worshipped as asceticism.

“We mothers—” simpered Mrs. Honeychurch, and then realized that she was affected, sentimental, bombastic—all the things she hated most.

Soon he detected in her a wonderful reticence. She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.

Was it likely that a clergyman and a gentleman would refer to his engagement in a manner so flippant?

“I’m shockingly stupid over local affairs,” said the young man languidly.

“I can’t even remember the difference between a Parish Council and a Local Government Board. Perhaps there is no difference, or perhaps those aren’t the right names. I only go into the country to see my friends and to enjoy the scenery. It is very remiss of me.”

“I have no profession,” said Cecil. “It is another example of my decadence. My attitude—quite an indefensible one—is that so long as I am no trouble to any one I have a right to do as I like. I know I ought to be getting money out of people, or devoting myself to things I don’t care a straw about, but somehow, I’ve not been able to begin.”

At the time he had given surreptitious tugs to the string himself.

“A parson fenceless would mean a parson defenceless.”
Lucy was slow to follow what people said, but quick enough to detect what they meant. She missed Cecil’s epigram, but grasped the feeling that prompted it.

He had had full warning of Mr. Flack’s intentions, and might have bought the plot before building commenced: but he was apathetic and dilatory.

She called everywhere; her calls were returned with enthusiasm, and by the time people found out that she was not exactly of their milieu, they liked her, and it did not seem to matter.

“I trust they are the right sort of person. All right, Lucy”—she was sitting up again—“I see you looking down your nose and thinking your mother’s a snob. But there is a right sort and a wrong sort, and it’s affectation to pretend there isn’t.”

Her face was inartistic—that of a peevish virago.

As long as Lucy thought that his own smart friends were supplanting the Miss Alans, she had not minded.