In the eighth chapter, Lucy has returned from Italy and accepted Cecil's proposal. When the narrator grants the reader access to this new character's thoughts for the first time, Cecil muses on Lucy and uses a simile to compare her to a painting by Leonardo da Vinci:

She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us. The things are assuredly not of this life; no woman of Leonardo’s could have anything so vulgar as a ‘story’. She did develop most wonderfully day by day.

The reader's first impression of Cecil is not overwhelmingly positive. On Cecil's behalf, the narrator divulges that he initially saw Lucy "as a common-place girl who happened to be musical." When he met her in Rome, she had at first "seemed a typical tourist — shrill, crude, and gaunt with travel." Cecil is evidently an unsympathetic and judgmental person. What's more, he sees his own fiancée as a painting and feels that people love her not for what she is but for what she signifies. Ultimately, he is eager for Lucy to "develop."

The metaphor of Lucy as a painting (as Cecil's painting) returns repeatedly throughout the second half of the novel. In the ninth chapter, Lucy expresses her fierce dislike of Mr. Eager, to the surprise of Mrs. Honeychurch and Cecil. The narrator writes that the latter finds her outburst incongruous, and he again sees her as a painting by da Vinci:

It was as if one should see the Leonardo on the ceiling of the Sistine. He longed to hint to her that not here lay her vocation; that a woman’s power and charm reside in mystery, not in muscular rant. But possibly rant is a sign of vitality: it mars the beautiful creature, but shows that she is alive. After a moment, he contemplated her flushed face and excited gestures with a certain approval. He forbore to repress the sources of youth.

As she rants about Mr. Eager, Lucy does something she rarely does: she expresses her own uninhibited feelings. It is not wholly surprising that Lucy's mother attempts to quell her daughter's spiteful words about another person, especially a clergyman. Cecil's internal response, however, is shocking in its calculation and condescension. Part of him wants to tell her off for expressing her feelings strongly, as he feels that women should conceal their emotions rather than express them. Another part of him, however, is attracted to her intense emotions. This passage reveals the degree to which Cecil's understanding of Lucy is always informed by his devotion to propriety and the opinions of good society. 

In relation to this, Cecil detests the people in Lucy's life and does not see any of them as good society. He again invokes the Leonardo metaphor when in the company of Lucy's family members and friends, thinking about how in "January he would rescue his Leonardo from this stupefying twaddle." The Leonardo metaphor comes up one final time in the seventeenth chapter, when Lucy breaks off her engagement with Cecil:

He looked at her, instead of through her, for the first time since they were engaged. From a Leonardo she had become a living woman, with mysteries and forces of her own, with qualities that even eluded art.

In the end, Lucy has to stand up to Cecil to make him see her as a real woman. His newfound respect is accompanied by actual love; this is the first time he says her loves her.