How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #10
She lowered her eyes a moment to the black abyss of the past. They had crossed it, always excepting Leonard and Charles. They were building up a new life, obscure, yet gilded with tranquility. Leonard was dead; Charles had two years more in prison. One usen't always to see clearly before that time. It was different now. (44.10)
Margaret has finally come to accept the passing of time and the inevitable changes in her life – things are, of course, different after Leonard's death, and the new family that's emerged (Margaret, Henry, Helen, and the baby) is doing it's best to create a new life at Howards End, connected to the ancestral past (Mrs. Wilcox), but broken off from the events lost in the "black abyss" of the past year and a half.
Quote #11
"All the same, London's creeping."
She pointed over the meadow--over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust.
"You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now," she continued. "I can see it from the Purbeck Downs. And London is only part of something else, I'm afraid. Life's going to be melted down, all over the world."
Margaret knew that her sister spoke truly. Howards End, Oniton, the Purbeck Downs, the Oderberge, were all survivals, and the melting-pot was being prepared for them. Logically, they had no right to be alive. One's hope was in the weakness of logic. Were they possibly the earth beating time?
"Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever," she said. "This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that our house is the future as well as the past." (44.19-23)
Helen points out the fact that life as they know it at Howards End – which is somehow real, substantial, natural – is inevitably coming to its end with the spread of the industrial city. However, Margaret still holds out hope that the demon "civilization" can't possibly go on undefeated forever; she feels that somehow something that they have at Howards End (authentic Englishness? Nature? Or her idea of love?) will go on forever, despite the changing world.