“I don’t know. I hate him. I’ve heard him lecture on Giotto. I hate him. Nothing can hide a petty nature. I hate him.”
“My goodness gracious me, child!” said Mrs. Honeychurch. “You’ll blow my head off! Whatever is there to shout over? I forbid you and Cecil to hate any more clergymen.”
He smiled. There was indeed something rather incongruous in Lucy’s moral outburst over Mr. Eager. It was as if one should see the Leonardo on the ceiling of the Sistine. He longed to hint to her that not here lay her vocation; that a woman’s power and charm reside in mystery, not in muscular rant. But possibly rant is a sign of vitality: it mars the beautiful creature, but shows that she is alive. After a moment, he contemplated her flushed face and excited gestures with a certain approval. He forebore to repress the sources of youth.
Nature—simplest of topics, he thought—lay around them. He praised the pine-woods, the deep lasts of bracken, the crimson leaves that spotted the hurt-bushes, the serviceable beauty of the turnpike road. 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.
“I count myself a lucky person,” he concluded, “When I’m in London I feel I could never live out of it. When I’m in the country I feel the same about the country. After all, I do believe that birds and trees and the sky are the most wonderful things in life, and that the people who live amongst them must be the best. It’s true that in nine cases out of ten they don’t seem to notice anything. The country gentleman and the country labourer are each in their way the most depressing of companions. Yet they may have a tacit sympathy with the workings of Nature which is denied to us of the town. Do you feel that, Mrs. Honeychurch?”
Mrs. Honeychurch started and smiled. She had not been attending. Cecil, who was rather crushed on the front seat of the victoria, felt irritable, and determined not to say anything interesting again.
Lucy had not attended either. Her brow was wrinkled, and she still looked furiously cross—the result, he concluded, of too much moral gymnastics. It was sad to see her thus blind to the beauties of an August wood.
“‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height,’” he quoted, and touched her knee with his own.
She flushed again and said: “What height?”
“‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height,
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang).
In height and in the splendour of the hills?’