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Lucy Honeychurch arrived in Florence full of eagerness and frustration. She and her chaperone, the careful, easily scandalized Charlotte Bartlett, had been promised rooms with a view of the Arno at the Pensione Bertolini, but were shown modest chambers that looked into a dull courtyard. At dinner among the English guests, the outspoken Mr. Emerson and his quiet, introspective son George offered to exchange their river-facing rooms with the ladies. The offer was generous and unorthodox, and Charlotte bridled at the impropriety of accepting a favor from strangers. Mr. Beebe, a genial clergyman also staying at the pension, smoothed tensions and persuaded Charlotte to accept. The exchange placed Lucy at the window she had dreamed of, staring out at the dusky water and the pale hills, while the Emersons retired without complaint to the rooms without a view.
In the days that followed, Florence began to work on Lucy’s spirit. She carried a Baedeker guidebook and followed Miss Eleanor Lavish, a flamboyant novelist determined to experience the city “without a guide,” into the labyrinth of streets. Miss Lavish promptly became distracted by acquaintances and lost Lucy among cloisters and piazzas. Wandering on her own, Lucy entered Santa Croce, where she happened again upon Mr. Emerson and George. Mr. Emerson’s plain, earnest remarks about art and truth disturbed Charlotte’s notions of propriety, yet his kindness charmed Lucy. The city felt strange and alluring, offering a promise of something freer than the careful life she had known at home in Surrey.
One afternoon in the Piazza della Signoria, Lucy witnessed a sudden quarrel between two men. A knife flashed; a young man fell. The shock overwhelmed her, and she fainted amid a scatter of the photographs she had just purchased. George Emerson, who had been nearby, caught her and carried her to safety. When she revived, he tossed her blood-spotted photographs into the Arno so she would not be haunted by them. The gesture, as decisive as it was mystifying, unsettled Lucy. No one had acted for her with such directness before. She thanked him, embarrassed and grateful, and the memory lodged in her mind like a stone dropped into clear water, its ripples slow but inexorable.
The English colony in Florence fussed about propriety. Mr. Eager, a local clergyman jealous of Mr. Beebe’s easy manner and suspicious of the Emersons, warned the ladies against the father and son. Yet a day was arranged for a drive into the hills to Fiesole. The bright afternoon unspooled along white roads and silver-leafed olives, the carriages separated and reformed as parties strayed to admire views and pick their way through violets. Lucy, drifting away from the chaperoned safety of Charlotte and Miss Lavish, stepped into a field thick with purple blooms. George, who had been sent to retrieve her, followed across the meadow. Under the pale sky, as the wind lifted the violets and the distant city shone, he kissed her.
Charlotte, arriving just in time to see the kiss, pulled Lucy away in a flood of admonitions and distress. To Charlotte, the kiss was a calamity. To Lucy, it was a bewildering event that lit up the outline of something new, then vanished as quickly as it appeared. Before the impulse could settle into clarity, Charlotte decided they must leave Florence at once. They departed for Rome, and Florence, with its sudden passions and unblushing sunlight, receded behind them like a view from a window that had been shut.
In Rome, Lucy encountered Cecil Vyse, an intelligent, self-conscious young man from a more rarefied world. He and his mother were old family friends. Cecil admired Lucy in a chilly, aesthetic way, praising what he called her simplicity without ever letting her forget he was the arbiter of refinement. He proposed, and Lucy refused, though she scarcely knew why. She returned at last to Windy Corner, her family home in the Surrey countryside, where her mother, Mrs. Honeychurch, and her boisterous brother Freddy resumed their cheerful routines. The English spring poured over hedges and lanes; the piano in the drawing room waited for Lucy’s touch. The vivid memories of Florence dimmed, kept at bay by the safe, sensible life that pressed all around her.
Cecil came to visit. He proposed again; Lucy refused. Yet the pressure of expectation—her mother’s eagerness, society’s approving nod, Cecil’s persistence—pressed harder than the faint, delicate thread of memory that bound her to a kiss in a field of violets. When Cecil proposed a third time, in the garden under a sky mottled with English clouds, Lucy accepted him. She announced the engagement to Mr. Beebe and to Freddy, who wrinkled his nose at Cecil’s aloofness but wished her well. Cecil’s presence in the house changed the air. He disdained tennis, disliked open laughter, and corrected people gently but incessantly. He declared that Lucy must be protected from the vulgar and the second-rate and saw himself as the curator of her tastes. Lucy, telling herself that such cultivation was love, tried to be pleased.
Sir Harry Otway, a neighbor with two small villas to let—named, unaccountably, Cissie and Albert—asked Lucy’s family to help him find respectable tenants. Cecil, amused by the English habit of keeping people in their proper place, recommended two ladies he claimed to have met in London. They turned out to be the Miss Alans from Florence, sweet and timid travelers, but the negotiation went awry. Instead, through a chain of Cecil’s meddling that he meant as a kind of joke on the neighbors, the tenants who took one of the cottages were none other than Mr. Emerson and George. Lucy, hearing this, turned cold. The past she had tried to deny had followed her to the very hedge of Windy Corner, and something in her, partly alarmed and partly exhilarated, stirred again.
The Emersons’ arrival brought fresh air into Summer Street. Mr. Emerson spoke out loud what others only thought. George, haunted and earnest, was invited by Freddy to join their tennis games, for Freddy liked him immediately. On a bright afternoon at Windy Corner, with racquets thwacking and laughter flaring, Lucy found herself strolling along the laurel bushes while Cecil drifted indoors to read and criticize, and Mr. Beebe watched the youthful energy with fond detachment. Among the shrubs and the scent of cut grass, George caught Lucy’s hand and kissed her again. The world contracted to that warm instant—then sprang outward as Freddy’s voice sounded and Mr. Beebe approached. Lucy, shaken to the core, recoiled. She ordered George to go, insisted that nothing had happened, that he must leave their house and never speak of it.
That evening Cecil read aloud a newly published melodramatic tale by Miss Lavish, who had turned Lucy’s lost Roman wanderings and the Fiesole afternoon into fiction without names. In the scene Cecil declaimed, two young people in a violet field were overcome by a sudden, fateful kiss. The words fell like stones into a pond. Lucy realized immediately that Miss Lavish knew the secret because Charlotte must have told it. Cecil laughed at the silliness of novelists who “invent scenes that never occur,” even as the true scene smoldered in Lucy’s cheeks. The mortifying exposure, though disguised in print, brought the buried truth pounding back to life.
George, who would not pretend away what had happened, spoke to Lucy when he found a moment. He told her that he loved her, that he had loved her since Florence, that he believed she loved him too, and that she must not allow Cecil—or anyone—to arrange her life like furniture in a drawing room. Lucy, frightened by the clarity of his conviction and the turbulence he caused inside her, denied him and sent him away. But denial did not ease her. The engagement to Cecil, which had felt like a safe enclosure, began to feel like a room with no air.
At last, the pressure became unbearable. In a scene both painful and liberating, Lucy told Cecil she could not marry him. She said they were not suited, that he did not see her as she was. To his credit, Cecil recognized the truth in her words, though he winced at the humiliation. He released her, sarcastic and wounded, calling himself a snob without fully understanding what that meant. When he left Windy Corner, the house felt suddenly larger, and Lucy felt both dizzy with relief and stricken with the knowledge of what she had done.
Mr. Emerson, hearing of the broken engagement, came to the house and asked to speak to Lucy privately. He approached her not as a schemer but as a father. He reminded her, in stumbling, fervent words, that life is short and truth is simple, that to deny love is to deny the best part of oneself. He spoke of his late wife, of the ways people wall themselves off from joy out of fear of scandal or disapproval. He told Lucy that George was suffering because he believed he had lost her through his own boldness, and that Lucy, if she were honest, knew she loved him. The old man’s sincerity pierced defenses that Cecil’s irony had only hardened. Lucy tried once more to protest that she did not care for George, but the words would not form. What she felt had the unmistakable shape of love, and it had been there from Florence onward, under every pretense, waiting to be acknowledged.
The admission, once made, changed everything. Lucy saw that much of her conduct had been governed by a wish to please and not to be thought unladylike. She had trusted Charlotte’s fear more than her own heart. She had allowed Cecil’s refinements to stand between her and the rough, living world. The violets in Fiesole, the tossing photographs, the river’s glint beneath the pension window—all returned with their original freshness, not as sentimental memories but as signposts to a path she had been meant to take. She realized as well that Charlotte, for all her meddling, had not acted out of malice so much as from a lifetime of caution. The knowledge softened Lucy’s anger, though it did not excuse the harm.
There were still obstacles. Mrs. Honeychurch, though loving, fretted about talk in Summer Street. Freddy exulted in the broken engagement but did not grasp its depth. Mr. Beebe, who admired Lucy’s spirit, wondered whether sudden passion would last. Lucy herself, newly resolved, felt the familiar tug of duty. Yet the change in her was firm. She went to George not in secret shame but with open purpose. When they met, the words were few and direct. The kiss that followed, no longer a stolen thing, belonged to them as surely as the air and the sunlight belonged to the garden.
In time, Lucy and George returned to Florence together. They took a room at the Pensione Bertolini, the very room she had first wanted, the windows open on the river, the dome of the cathedral rising beyond the huddle of roofs. The city seemed both new and familiar, as if it had been waiting for them to arrive as themselves and not as anxious guests wearing borrowed proprieties. Outside, carts rattled and voices drifted up in the evening; inside, the small room contained a world. Lucy thought of Windy Corner, of her mother and Freddy, of Mr. Beebe and even Cecil, and hoped for reconciliation without letting it rule her. She sat at the window as the sky deepened, and George stood behind her with his hand on her shoulder.
The view, once only a symbol of what she had desired, was now simply the view from the place she had chosen. The river moved as it always had, carrying away old fears and bringing in fresh light. Florence remained itself, indifferent and generous. The violets on the hillside still bloomed somewhere beyond the city’s edge. Lucy had come to understand that a life can be cramped by rooms without windows, by opinions taken as laws, by fear of muddle and gossip. She had also come to see that clarity is not coldness and that passion is not a lapse in judgment but often judgment’s truest companion. She had learned that courage sometimes appears as a simple yes, spoken after too many timid noes.
In that small pension room, as evening bells rolled across the roofs, Lucy and George looked out together. They did not speak of the path that had led them there—the exchange of rooms, the piazza with its sudden violence, the violet field, Charlotte’s alarm, Cecil’s proposals, the tennis game, the kiss by the laurels, the humiliating reading aloud, the broken engagement, Mr. Emerson’s heartfelt plea. All of it was present without being named, absorbed into the quiet knowledge they shared. Beyond the window, the Arno caught the last light. The city, composed of stone and air and memory, seemed to lean forward. Lucy rested her cheek against George’s hand, and the room, at last, had a view.