as he had been.

"Do you go to much of this sort of thing?" he asked when they were
driving home.

"Oh, now and then," said Lucy, who had rather enjoyed herself.

"Is it typical of country society?"

"I suppose so. Mother, would it be?"

"Plenty of society," said Mrs. Honeychurch, who was trying to remember
the hang of one of the dresses.

Seeing that her thoughts were elsewhere, Cecil bent towards Lucy and
said:

"To me it seemed perfectly appalling, disastrous, portentous."

"I am so sorry that you were stranded."

"Not that, but the congratulations. It is so disgusting, the way an
engagement is regarded as public property--a kind of waste place where
every outsider may shoot his vulgar sentiment. All those old women
smirking!"

"One has to go through it, I suppose. They won't notice us so much next
time."

"But my point is that their whole attitude is wrong. An
engagement--horrid word in the first place--is a private matter, and
should be treated as such."

Yet the smirking old women, however wrong individually, were racially
correct. The spirit of the generations had smiled through them,
rejoicing in the engagement of Cecil and Lucy because it promised the
continuance of life on earth. To Cecil and Lucy it promised something
quite different--personal love. Hence Cecil's irritation and Lucy's
belief that his irritation was just.

"How tiresome!" she said. "Couldn't you have escaped to tennis?"

"I don't play tennis--at least, not in public. The neighbourhood is
deprived of the romance of me being athletic. Such romance as I have is
that of the Inglese Italianato."

"Inglese Italianato?"

"E un diavolo incarnato! You know the proverb?"

She did not. Nor did it seem applicable to a young man who had spent a
quiet winter in Rome with his mother. But Cecil, since his engagement,
had taken to affect a cosmopolitan naughtiness which he was far from
possessing.

"Well," said he, "I cannot help it if they do disapprove of me. There
are certain irremovable barriers between myself and them, and I must
accept them."

"We all have our limitations, I suppose," said wise Lucy.

"Sometimes they are forced on us, though," said Cecil, who saw from her
remark that she did not quite understand his position.

"How?"

"It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in,
or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?"

She thought a moment, and agreed that it did make a differen