A Room With a View by Edward Morgan Forster Chapter 9 Page 3

“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