A Room with a View: Chapters 16–20

Would not he, the cad, the charlatan, attempt a more dramatic finish?

She had chosen the moment before bed, when, in accordance with their bourgeois habit, she always dispensed drinks to the men.

She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words.

Isn’t Romance capricious! I never notice it in you young people; you do nothing but play lawn tennis, and say that romance is dead, while the Miss Alans are struggling with all the weapons of propriety against the terrible thing.

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for me. There the contrast is just as much as I can realize. But not the Parthenon, not the frieze of Phidias at any price.

The house was again as it ought to be—cut off forever from Cecil’s pretentious world.

Always complaisant, he put the letter away.

It is odd how we of that pension, who seemed such a fortuitous collection, have been working into one another’s lives.

Freddy lit his bicycle lamp for him in the porch, and with his usual felicity of phrase, said: “This has been a day and a half.”

At that moment Mr. Beebe came back from church. His cassock was covered with rain.

“Don’t you think it very plucky of her, Mr. Emerson, to undertake the two Miss Alans? Now, Miss Honeychurch, go back—keep warm. I think three is such a courageous number to go travelling.”

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

“Your soul, dear Lucy! I hate the word now, because of all the cant with which superstition has wrapped it round. But we have souls. I cannot say how they came nor whither they go, but we have them, and I see you ruining yours.”

Trembling, anxious, cumbered with much digestive bread, they did proceed to Constantinople, they did go round the world. The rest of us must be contented with a fair, but a less arduous, goal.

Youth enwrapped them; the song of Phaethon announced passion requited, love attained.