“Lights in a storm”

The “Lights in a storm” image expresses the defining contradiction in Katharine Hilbery and Ralph Denham’s connection: their meetings can feel vivid and momentarily complete, but the two cannot keep that closeness steady. The image links an early description of their rare encounters to a later attempt to explain why they repeatedly lose hold of one another, turning romance into a pattern of illumination and disappearance.

First Image: Love in the Hurricane

While discussing the contrast between Cassandra Otway’s certainty and their own uncertain attachment, Katharine observes that she and Ralph see each other only now and then. Ralph completes the image with “Like lights in a storm--”; Katharine answers, “In the midst of a hurricane,” as the window shakes under the wind. Their brief exchange makes the weather more than scenery: the storm gives physical force to a relationship whose moments of recognition are surrounded by instability.

The image also distinguishes their experience from the easier love they associate with Cassandra and William Rodney. The music begins again, and Ralph hears Mozart’s melody as expressing the pair upstairs’ uncomplicated love. Against that apparent ease, the storm-lit image names a bond that is intense but interrupted, dependent on fleeting meetings rather than settled assurance.

The Image Returns as an Explanation

Later, when Katharine and Ralph attempt to account for their “lapses,” Katharine revises the earlier metaphor: “It's the faces in a storm again--the vision in a hurricane.” She taps the table while insisting on “Reality--reality,” making the question not simply whether they feel love but whether each can remain present to the other as a real person. Ralph believes they are in love, recalling their happiness together for half an hour; Katharine objects that he ceases to see her as real.

The narration sets out the recurring pattern behind this language. Ralph’s sense of Katharine’s romance may rise when her appearance or manner strikes him as beautiful, strange, or unexpected, and overwhelm him into silence or inarticulate feeling. When she interrupts that idealized vision with a prosaic fact, it disappears; Ralph then fears that he loves only her shadow, not her reality. The storm image therefore gathers the danger in his romantic vision: a brief flash of intensity may illuminate an imagined figure while obscuring the person beside him.

Separation, Recurrence, and Meaning

Katharine describes a corresponding but different form of withdrawal. Her attention can turn inward until she becomes absorbed in her own thoughts and resents being called back to Ralph. The narration notes that these trances may begin with Ralph’s romantic intensities, yet eventually have little to do with him; she seems to have no need of him and resists the reminder of his presence. Their lapses are thus not a single misunderstanding but a recurring asymmetry: he fears that he loves an illusion, while she can become detached from the relationship itself.

By returning to the storm and its fleeting lights, the novel gives a shared figure to two people who struggle to share a stable reality. Their words briefly meet in the earlier exchange, but the later conversation exposes how little that poetic agreement resolves. The image’s force lies in that tension: the lovers recognize one another in flashes, then part again, leaving the very fact of their love uncertain.