Quote 1
"I didn't know what to do with them," he cried, and his voice was that of an anxious boy. Her heart warmed towards him for the first time. "They were covered with blood. There! I'm glad I've told you; and all the time we were making conversation I was wondering what to do with them." He pointed down-stream. "They've gone." The river swirled under the bridge. "I did mind them so, and one is so foolish, it seemed better that they should go out to the sea—I don't know; I may just mean that they frightened me. Then the boy verged into a man. "For something tremendous has happened; I must face it without getting muddled. It isn't exactly that a man has died" (4.23).
George has just thrown Lucy’s soiled photographs into the river in an act of desperation and we see in his confusion the struggle between boyhood and manhood. He’s uncertain of how to deal with what has just happened, and clearly he feels, as Lucy does, as though something in his life has changed forever.
Quote 2
"It is being young," he said quietly, picking up his racquet from the floor and preparing to go. "It is being certain that Lucy cares for me really. It is that love and youth matter intellectually" (16.29).
Youth, for George, is incredibly important. It gives him a kind of confidence and certainty, as though being young gives one the right to pursue happiness. In this book, and in life (or so we like to think) it does – it just takes Lucy a while to figure this out.
Quote 3
“[Cecil] daren't let a woman decide. He's the type who's kept Europe back for a thousand years. Every moment of his life he's forming you, telling you what's charming or amusing or ladylike, telling you what a man thinks womanly; and you, you of all women, listen to his voice instead of to your own” (16.24).
George sees right through Cecil’s “chivalry.” Here, he makes his already-obvious position as the anti-Cecil even more evident; he shows Lucy what she was unwilling (or unable?) to see about her fiancé. Because it’s absolutely the truth, it’s impossible for Lucy not to see Cecil in this light after her encounter with George.