Edmund Swettenham and Phillipa Haymes’s developing relationship

Edmund Swettenham and Phillipa Haymes’s developing relationship takes shape in an exchange that turns courtship into a contest over whether Phillipa will disclose what she feels. Edmund approaches her while she is pricking out winter lettuce; she keeps the conversation cool and tells him to leave, while he insists that his pursuit is serious and that he has a reason to be there. Beneath the playful argument, he makes a strikingly open admission: he has fallen in love with her and wants to understand the thoughts and feelings she keeps to herself.

A guarded meeting

Phillipa is working in the garden when Edmund comes to see her. Asked whether he wants anything in particular, he answers that he wants to see her. Her glance is quick, and her response is wary: she does not want him arriving in this way and worries that Mrs Lucas will disapprove. When Edmund asks whether Mrs Lucas forbids her to have followers, Phillipa dismisses the suggestion as absurd and tells him to go away, saying he has no business there.

The setting gives their disagreement a practical surface. Phillipa is occupied with winter lettuce, and Edmund claims that Mrs Lucas’s call to his mother about having plenty of vegetable marrows gives him business at the house. But his own explanation of the word “followers” makes clear that he is not there merely on a gardening pretext. He calls it a fitting description of his attitude: respectful and keeping his distance, yet firmly pursuing her. The joke does not erase Phillipa’s resistance; it lets Edmund name his persistence while she continues to hold him at arm’s length.

The argument over Phillipa’s reserve

Edmund frames Phillipa’s composure through the phrase “Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.” He says it is not intended as a compliment, and connects her effect on him to Maud’s effect on another man: both, in his account, have got under someone’s skin. Phillipa rejects his teasing as absurd, but the exchange has shifted from his excuse for visiting to his frustration with the emotional distance he perceives in her.

His complaint becomes direct. He asks what goes on behind her regular features and whether she is happy, miserable, frightened, or something else. Phillipa answers quietly that what she feels is her own business. Her response marks the boundary at the centre of this scene: she does not accept that Edmund’s interest gives him a right to her private thoughts.

Edmund’s confession and changed outlook

Edmund answers that her feelings are his business too, insists that he has a right to know, and admits that he did not want to fall in love with her. He had wanted to sit quietly and write a book about how miserable the world is. In his telling, that book’s pessimism had become easy and habitual: he had learned to be clever about general misery rather than to engage with what another person actually feels.

He then links his new conviction to reading a life of Burne-Jones. Phillipa stops pricking out the lettuce and looks at him with a puzzled frown, asking what Burne-Jones has to do with the matter. Her interruption leaves the connection unexplained in the exchange, but the pause is significant: for once, Edmund’s declaration has arrested her attention. The scene presents the relationship not as a settled agreement but as a movement from banter and resistance toward a difficult, still-unresolved conversation about intimacy, emotional privacy, and the limits of his pursuit.