A Room with a View

At the Sacred Lake: Reminiscing and Cecil’s Admiration

Lucy shakes off the difficult subject and leads Cecil deeper into the wood, pausing at particularly beautiful or familiar combinations of the trees. She has known the wood between Summer Street and Windy Corner since she could walk alone; she used to play at losing Freddy in it when he was a purple-faced baby; and although she has been to Italy, the wood has lost none of its charm. Presently they come to a little clearing among the pines, a tiny green alp that holds a shallow pool. Lucy exclaims “The Sacred Lake!” and explains she cannot remember why she calls it that, perhaps from some book; after heavy rains a good deal of water comes down and the pool becomes quite large and beautiful, and Freddy used to bathe there. When Cecil asks if she is fond of it too, she answers dreamily that she used to bathe there herself until she was found out, after which there was a row. Cecil, delighted rather than shocked by what he calls her admirable simplicity, looks at her by the pool’s edge and is reminded of a brilliant flower that blooms abruptly out of a world of green. She tells him it was Charlotte who found her out, murmuring the name over; Cecil says “Poor girl!” with no understanding of its full weight, and a certain scheme he had shrunk from now appears practical.

Cecil’s First Kiss Request and Disappointing Embrace

In the secluded setting, Cecil becomes serious and tells Lucy he wants to ask her something he has never asked before, reminding her that he never did so even on the lawn when she agreed to marry him. He grows self-conscious, glancing round to see if they are observed, and his courage fails. Lucy waits, kindly, until he finally says that up to now he has never kissed her. She flushes scarlet and stammers, “No—more you have.” He asks whether he may now, and she tells him of course he may, that he might have done so before, and that she cannot run at him. At the supreme moment he is conscious only of absurdities: her reply is inadequate, she gives a business-like lift to her veil, and as he approaches he wishes he could recoil; as he touches her, his gold pince-nez is dislodged and flattened between them. Cecil reflects that the embrace was a failure, arguing that passion should forget civility and consideration and never ask leave where there is a right of way; he recasts the scene in his mind, imagining himself rushing up to seize her so that she might then permit and revere him for his manliness.