A Room with a View

Lunch and Musical Interlude

Lunch is unusually cheerful, and Lucy feels guaranteed against her usual mealtime depressions. Afterwards she plays from memory the enchanted-garden music from Gluck’s Armide—immortal, rippling music unsuitable for the piano—until Cecil, restive, calls for the Flower Maidens’ scene from Parsifal instead. She complies, but as she begins she discovers George has quietly entered the room. Flushing, she restarts the music for Cecil’s sake, plays a few bars badly, and stops. Freddy proposes tennis, and the household divides into players and readers.

Sunday Tennis at Windy Corners

The afternoon tennis finds Lucy partnered with Mr. Floyd, free at last from the piano’s restraint. George serves with surprising determination to win, and Lucy remembers his despairing cry by the Arno—“I shall want to live”—as he stands for all he is worth in the lowering sun. Cecil, in a critical mood, refuses to make up a fourth and instead strolls the precincts reading aloud from the bad novel he is forced to endure, even halting the game to share a murder scene and a triplet of split infinitives. The chapter closes with the Weald glowing like the Tuscan plain around them.

第十五章

This is Chapter XV (15) of the narrative, centered on a casual afternoon garden gathering following a tennis match. The group reads a newly published novel aloud, uncovers the true identity of the book’s anonymous author, discusses unconventional perspectives on natural scenery, discovers that the novel’s plot mirrors private shared experiences between two of the attendees, and ends with an impulsive romantic moment between those two characters.