In the Tideway — Key Ideas to Explore

The Unromantic Quarrel

When Lockhart asks why they finally parted, Willina Macdonald refuses to embellish. She contrasts their mundane falling-out with the contrived misunderstandings of novels: a letter left in a blotting book, a wrong initial, a false announcement of marriage. Instead, she states flatly, “We just quarrelled, and didn't care to make it up.” This bluntness undercuts any expectation of tragic fate or grand passion.

Lockhart, too, avoids melodrama. He recalls the quarrel as “ridiculously little” and admits that if not for an untimely arrival, they would have reconciled as usual. The passage reveals a shared, almost clinical awareness of their own pettiness. Steel uses this exchange to suggest that memory itself is selective: Lockhart dwells on the lost possibility, while Willina insists on the prosaic truth. Their disagreement about the past becomes a quiet power struggle over narrative control.

Tides, Currents, and Shelter

The title In the Tideway finds concrete expression in the characters' language. Lockhart speaks of being “in the swim” of society; the crowd on the staircase is described as a current with eddies and backwaters. Later, by the shore, the professor's despair is “blocked out” by Rick's figure heading to the boat-house, and Lockhart notes that “the tide will be turning before he could walk back to shelter.”

These water metaphors extend to the characters' emotional states. Lockhart and Willina stand at a window, their shadows cast by firelight, while outside the autumn twilight fades. The physical setting mirrors their suspended relationship: they are caught between past and present, between the impulse to rekindle and the knowledge that time has moved on. Even the boat-house, with its new rowlocks, hints at preparations for a crossing that may never be made.

The Knitting Needles and the Unspoken

Steel uses small physical details to convey tension. When Lockhart presses Willina about whether she will marry “that man on the other side,” she takes up her knitting “half mechanically,” and the needles “clashed fast and furious.” The clashing needles speak louder than her evasive words. Lockhart, in turn, leans forward with “his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped together,” a posture that suggests both earnestness and restraint.

These gestures are not merely decorative; they carry the weight of what is left unsaid. Willina's laugh is “half-nervous, half-gratified,” revealing a flicker of pleasure at being remembered despite her insistence on the quarrel's triviality. Lockhart's repeated question—“Why did we quarrel?”—becomes a refrain that circles back to the same inconclusive answer. The novel's emotional core lies not in dramatic revelations but in these small, telling moments of hesitation and composure.

Readers attentive to dialogue will find the novel's drama in what is withheld as much as in what is spoken. Steel's characters are adept at deflection, and their silences—the pause before a reply, the sudden focus on a mundane task—carry more weight than any confession. The tide metaphor, introduced early, serves as a reminder that some moments, once passed, cannot be reclaimed. This is a story less about reunion than about the shape of a loss that neither party can fully articulate.

I was thinking today about the tide in Flora Annie Steel's novel, that quiet ache of two people watching the same water move past them. It made me remember sitting with The Honey-Pot — Inside the Classic, where the same sense of something shared but slipping away lingers on the page. Just that gentle echo of time. A small, private recognition.