Arrival at Summer Street Villas
The woods open onto a sloping triangular meadow lined with pretty cottages, with a new, expensively simple stone church and a charming shingled spire marking its third side. Mr. Beebe’s modest house stands nearby, while great mansions are hidden in the trees. The scene suggests a Swiss Alpine retreat rather than the heart of country society. Its charm is marred, however, by two ugly new villas, “Cissie” and “Albert,” acquired by Sir Harry Otway on the very afternoon Lucy became engaged to Cecil. “Albert” is inhabited and its garden bright with geraniums; “Cissie” is to let, its paths already weedy and its lawn yellow with dandelions. The ladies pronounce the place ruined.
Encounter with Sir Harry Otway
As the carriage passes, “Cissie’s” door opens and Sir Harry Otway emerges. Mrs. Honeychurch commands the coachman to stop and demands that Sir Harry pull down the notice-boards at once, for she had warned him he ought to have bought the plot before construction began. Sir Harry explains he cannot turn out Miss Flack, the vulgar, nearly bedridden old lady who lives there rent free, and recounts how he had been apathetic and dilatory, knowing Summer Street so well he could not imagine it being spoilt. When he finally took alarm and called on Mr. Flack, the local builder, he found that tiles had been rejected in favor of cheaper slates and that all the Corinthian columns had been ordered, each with a different capital—one with dragons, one approaching the Ionian style, one bearing Mrs. Flack’s initials—for Mr. Flack had read his Ruskin. Not until an immovable aunt was inserted into one villa did Sir Harry buy, and the futile transaction has left him full of sadness.
Debate Over Villa Tenant Options
Sir Harry explains that he can only salvage matters by finding a desirable tenant for “Cissie,” but the rent is absurdly low, the size too large for peasants and too small for their own class. Cecil, hesitating between despising the villas or Sir Harry for despising them, suggests a bank clerk—prompting Sir Harry to lament that the improved train service and bicycles are drawing the wrong type of people. Lucy, recognizing Cecil is mocking the harmless baronet, intervenes and proposes the Misses Teresa and Catharine Alan, gentlewomen she met abroad, currently homeless and known to Mr. Beebe. Sir Harry is delighted, but Mrs. Honeychurch counsels against decayed gentlewomen with stuffy heirlooms, urging him to let to someone going up in the world. Cecil agrees they would be unsuitable; Sir Harry wavers. Mrs. Honeychurch warns against canaries and advises him to let only to a clean man, a suggestion both Sir Harry and Cecil find galling but wise. Sir Harry invites Mrs. Honeychurch to inspect the villa, and she descends eagerly while Cecil and Lucy walk home.
Cecil’s Disdain for Country Life and Sir Harry
Once out of earshot, Cecil denounces Sir Harry as a “hopeless vulgarian” who stands for all that is bad in country life—in London he would merely belong to a brainless club, but in the country he acts the little god with his gentility, patronage, and sham aesthetics, deceiving everyone, even Lucy’s mother. Lucy, though discouraged, admits it is quite true and wonders whether it matters so very much. Cecil insists it matters supremely, expressing hope that Sir Harry will be saddled with a tenant so vulgar he will notice it. Lucy and Cecil agree to forget him, though the scene has exposed the widening gap between Cecil’s ideals and the lived rural world Lucy inhabits.
Chapter IX
Chapter IX follows Lucy and Cecil as they walk together through the countryside near Summer Street. Their outing reveals tensions in their engagement: Lucy fears Cecil’s disapproval of her close friends, particularly Freddy, while Cecil grows oddly irritable when Lucy steers them toward roads rather than woods. A conversation about indoor versus outdoor imagery leads Cecil to a “cult of the open air,” and at a small pool Lucy calls the Sacred Lake, she reminisces about her childhood there with Freddy and Charlotte. Cecil, working up courage in the secluded setting, asks to kiss Lucy for the first time; the kiss itself becomes an awkward and disappointing encounter because of his self-consciousness and his pince-nez. As they walk away in silence, Lucy brings up Mr. Emerson by name in what is, unbeknownst to Cecil, the most intimate exchange they have yet shared.
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