“Lunching with destiny”

“Lunching with destiny” is Paul McGill’s playful name for meeting Emma Harte, a phrase that makes a social appointment sound like the beginning of a life already moving toward them. Its first use depends on a joke about whether destiny is a woman; its later return makes the joke more earnest, as Paul tells Emma that their future together remains unfinished. Across these appearances, the phrase joins flirtation to the novel’s larger tension between fate and self-determination.

The joke at the luncheon

At a social gathering, Paul declines an invitation to his father’s luncheon party the following day, explaining that he has “a long-standing appointment. With destiny.” The pause gives the final word the air of a proper name. Dolly Mosten takes it that way, asking whether she knows Destiny; Paul answers, “I don’t believe you do, Dolly.” His perfectly straight face sustains the joke while keeping its intended meaning concealed from her.

The exchange changes when Paul turns back to Emma. He asks, “I am, aren’t I?” and, when she asks what he means, supplies the phrase again: “Lunching with destiny.” Emma replies, “I thought you were lunching with Frank and me.” Her answer brings the grand word down to the immediate arrangement: the planned lunch is not a solitary romantic tryst but an appointment that includes her brother, Frank Harte. Still, Paul’s private meaning is clear to Emma, and her smile gives the exchange its warmth. The comedy rests on two readings at once: Dolly imagines an unknown woman, while Paul identifies Emma as the person who gives the appointment its significance.

From flirtation to reassurance

The phrase acquires greater emotional weight when Paul later repeats its underlying idea in a more vulnerable moment. Emma fears something has happened to him and rushes to meet him as he enters through the door connecting their suites, clutching the lapels of his trench coat. Paul reassures her that he is safe, invokes the years he expects to spend with her, and asks whether she has forgotten that she is his destiny. He adds that this destiny “hasn’t been fulfilled, yet, my love.”

The earlier quip thus becomes part of a continuing declaration rather than a disposable line. In the luncheon scene, destiny is an elegant cover for Paul’s feelings, delivered with comic restraint. In the later exchange, he uses the same idea to steady Emma and affirm the future he imagines for them. His language moves from a mock appointment to an explicit claim about their shared life. The word “yet” matters: it makes the declaration forward-looking, presenting their relationship not as a completed fate but as something still to be lived.

Destiny beside Emma’s agency

The phrase’s romance of inevitability contrasts with Emma’s own understanding of how a life is made. Her early experience at Fairley Hall has shown her the distance between the Fairleys’ splendour and the workers’ exhausting poverty. She concludes that money provides not only necessities but power and security, and refuses her father’s explanation that wealth is simply a matter of birth and luck. Emma instead imagines earning a fortune through a brilliant plan and relentless work. For her, the future must be built, not awaited.

That conviction becomes practical when she sets out for Leeds. She carefully presents herself as a young lady of quality, using clothes discarded from Olivia Wainright’s wardrobe and a genteel manner she has practised. She intends to work as many as eighteen hours a day if necessary to become a woman of substance. The contrast gives Paul’s phrase a productive ambiguity: Emma may be his “destiny,” but her own trajectory is defined by calculation, labour, and choices made under restrictive social conditions.

Those conditions have already shaped her experience of love. When Emma tells Edwin Fairley that she is pregnant, he considers marriage but falls silent, fearing his father’s reaction and the loss of his future as a barrister. He sees the class difference between them as impossible to bridge; Emma recognizes his silence as repudiation. Later, she refuses David Kallinski’s proposal because she will not hurt his Orthodox Jewish mother by marrying outside the faith. These choices make “destiny” no simple escape from social barriers. Love remains entangled with class, family obligation, and Emma’s refusal to treat other people’s costs as irrelevant.

A recurring name for a shared future

The expression’s structure depends on intimacy. Paul can say “destiny” to Dolly as if naming an elusive acquaintance, but its personal meaning emerges only when he turns to Emma. Her teasing correction about lunching with Frank does not reject that meaning; it keeps the moment grounded in their actual plans while allowing Paul’s romantic implication to stand. The phrase consequently operates as both a private signal and a public joke, its two functions occupying the same brief exchange.

Its later recurrence also changes how the first scene reads. The luncheon line anticipates Paul’s more direct assurance that Emma is central to the years he hopes to share with her. Yet the repeated language does not erase the distinction between wishing for a future and securing one: his assurance is a promise of intention, while the wording that their destiny is not fulfilled “yet” leaves its fulfilment ahead. The phrase’s force lies in that combination of certainty and incompletion. Paul speaks as though Emma is the person toward whom his life is directed; the novel’s account of Emma, meanwhile, insists that a future is also made through work, judgment, and difficult decisions.