A Room with a View

Post-Party Drive Home Conversation

Driving home, Cecil asks Lucy whether the gathering is typical of country society. Mrs. Honeychurch, preoccupied with the hang of a dress, offers little guidance, and Cecil confides to Lucy that the event seemed “perfectly appalling, disastrous, portentous.” He is especially repelled by the public nature of congratulations, declaring that an engagement should be treated as a private matter. The narrator observes that the older women’s smirking was, in a racial sense, correct: they rejoiced in the engagement as a promise of life’s continuance, while to Cecil and Lucy it promised only personal love. Lucy, accepting his irritation as valid, exclaims how tiresome the experience was.

Cecil’s Cosmopolitan Pretensions

When Lucy suggests Cecil could have escaped to tennis, he confesses he does not play publicly, explaining that his romance is that of the “Inglese Italianato”—a devil incarnate, according to the proverb. Lucy is unfamiliar with the phrase, and the narrator notes that Cecil has taken, since his engagement, to affecting a cosmopolitan naughtiness he is far from possessing. He declares that certain irremovable barriers exist between himself and others, and he must accept them. Wise Lucy remarks that everyone has limitations, and Cecil pushes further, asking whether a difference exists between self-imposed barriers and those imposed by others.

Fence Metaphor Discussion

Mrs. Honeychurch, suddenly alert, dismisses the distinction: “Fences are fences, especially when they are in the same place.” She illustrates her view by spreading out her knees and using her card-case as a diagram—herself, Windy Corner, and the surrounding pattern of other people. Cecil, jarred by the interruption, insists they were speaking of motives, not real fences, and Lucy laughingly explains they meant it in a poetic sense. Mrs. Honeychurch then declares that Mr. Beebe is a parson with no fences at all, and Cecil counters that a parson fenceless would mean a parson defenceless. Lucy, though slow to follow Cecil’s epigrams, perceives the feeling that prompted it and asks whether he likes Mr. Beebe. He insists he does, launching into another tirade on the subject of fences.