A Room with a View

Lucy’s Lie and Her Confrontation with Cecil

Lucy’s composure crumbles as she recalls having told a senseless lie that she never corrected. The lie has haunted her nerves and caused her to connect Cecil’s tenants with nondescript tourists from her past. Hurrying up the garden to find Cecil, she expects a word from him to soothe her shame. When she calls out to him, Cecil is in high spirits and claims to have won “a great victory for the Comic Muse,” invoking George Meredith’s idea that the cause of Comedy and the cause of Truth are the same. He reveals he met the new tenants in the National Gallery’s Umbrian Room, where they were admiring Luca Signorelli. When he learned they wanted a country cottage, he saw his opportunity to “score off Sir Harry” and arranged for them to take Cissie Villa. Lucy protests that this is unfair, that she took trouble for nothing and that her work has been undone. She accuses Cecil of being disloyal and making her look ridiculous. Cecil defends himself, arguing that anything is fair that punishes a snob and that the neighborhood will benefit from having more democratic tenants.

Cecil’s Revelation and Lucy’s Indignation

Cecil reveals the full extent of his scheme to bring the Emersons to the neighborhood as an experiment in social mixing. He dismisses Lucy’s objections as snobbishness, insisting that “the classes ought to mix” and that there should be intermarriage and other progressive reforms. When Lucy snaps that he does not know what democracy means, Cecil feels disappointed that she has failed to be “Leonardesque”—that is, to match his ideal of enlightened understanding. He perceives her face as “inartistic—that of a peevish virago” and concludes she is being narrow-minded. After Lucy leaves in anger, Cecil determines that the new tenants might have educational value for the neighborhood. He plans to tolerate the father and draw out the son, who was silent, bringing them to Windy Corner in the interests of the Comic Muse and of Truth. His final attitude shows him viewing this entire situation through the lens of his own intellectual framework, completely missing Lucy’s genuine distress and the emotional complexity of her position.