Forster's end-stage Victorian "social comedy" (middle-class Brits holidaying in Italy) asks if the English heart is "cold" or simply "undeveloped."
"The luxury of self-exposure kept [Lucy] almost happy through the long evening. She thought not so much of what had happened as of how she should describe it. All her sensations, her spasm of courage, her moments of unreasonable joy, her mysterious discontent, should be carefully laid before her cousin [Charlotte]. And together in divine confidence they would disentangle and interpret them all.
'At last,' thought [Lucy], 'I shall understand myself. I shan't again be troubled by things that come out of nothing, and mean I don't know what.'"
-- E.M. Forster
Image: Grand Canal, Venice, 1908, Claude Monet
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