A Room With A View

by E.M. Forster

They were tired, and under the guise of unselfishness they wrangled.

“Prato! They must go to Prato. That place is too sweetly squalid for words. I love it; I revel in shaking off the trammels of respectability, as you know.”

have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time—beautiful?” “Beautiful?” said Miss Bartlett, puzzled at the word. “Are not beauty and delicacy the same?” “So one would have thought,” said the other helplessly. “But things are so difficult, I sometimes think.”

Miss Bartlett, in her room, fastened the window-shutters and locked the door, and then made a tour of the apartment to see where the cupboards led, and whether there were any oubliettes or secret entrances.

“A smell! a true Florentine smell! Every city, let me teach you, has its own smell.” “Is it a very nice smell?” said Lucy, who had inherited from her mother a distaste to dirt. “One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness,” was the retort; “one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!” bowing right and left. “Look at that adorable wine-cart! How the driver stares at us, dear, simple soul!”

The hour was approaching at which the continental breakfast begins, or rather ceases, to tell, and the ladies bought some hot chestnut paste out of a little shop, because it looked so typical. It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown. But it gave them strength to drift into another Piazza, large and dusty, on the farther side of which rose a black-and-white facade of surpassing ugliness. Miss Lavish spoke to it dramatically. It was Santa Croce. The adventure was over.

There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr. Ruskin.

“My father has that effect on nearly everyone,” he informed her. “He will try to be kind.” “I hope we all try,” said she, smiling nervously. “Because we think it improves our characters. But he is kind to people because he loves them; and they find him out, and are offended, or frightened.”

Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano.

Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.

Mr. Beebe had lost everyone, and had consumed in solitude the tea-basket which he had brought up as a pleasant surprise.

The outdoor world was not very familiar to him, and occasionally he went wrong in a question of fact. Mrs. Honeychurch’s mouth twitched when he spoke of the perpetual green of the larch.

The train service has improved—a fatal improvement, to my mind.

Cecil, who had his full share of mediaeval mischievousness, replied that the physique of the lower middle classes was improving at a most appalling rate.

“The Garden of Eden,” pursued Mr. Emerson, still descending, “which you place in the past, is really yet to come. We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies.” Mr. Beebe disclaimed placing the Garden of Eden anywhere. “In this—not in other things—we men are ahead. We despise the body less than women do. But not until we are comrades shall we enter the garden.”

The garden of Windy Corners was deserted except for a red book, which lay sunning itself upon the gravel path.

She might be forgetting her Italy, but she was noticing more things in her England.

“You say Mr. Vyse wants me to listen to him, Mr. Emerson. Pardon me for suggesting that you have caught the habit.” And he took the shoddy reproof and touched it into immortality. He said: “Yes, I have,” and sank down as if suddenly weary. “I’m the same kind of brute at bottom. This desire to govern a woman—it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together before they shall enter the garden. But I do love you surely in a better way than he does.”

He looked at her, instead of through her, for the first time since they were engaged.

“‘Life’ wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.’

He had robbed the body of its taint, the world’s taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire.

Ah! it was worth while; it was the great joy that they had expected, and countless little joys of which they had never dreamt.