She looked at him with curiosity, a new interest for him in her deep dove-colored eyes.
“You, too!” she said.
“I don’t know what it is,” Roland continued. “I feel restless; I feel I must break loose. It’s all the same, one day after another, and what does it lead to?”
She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, her face resting upon the backs of her hands.
“Ah, don’t I know that feeling,” she said; “one waits, one says, ‘Something is sure to happen soon.’ But it doesn’t, and one goes on waiting. And one tries to run away, but one can’t escape from oneself.” Their eyes met and there seemed to be no further need for words between them. Roland’s thoughts traveled into spaces of vague and wistful speculation. A profound melancholy consumed him, a melancholy that was at the same time pleasant—a sugared sadness.
“What are you thinking of, Roland?” The use of his Christian name caused no surprise to him; it was natural that she should address him so. He answered her, his eyes looking into hers.
“I was thinking of how we spend our whole lives looking forward to things and looking back to things and that in itself the thing is nothing.”
She smiled at him. “So you’ve found that out too?” she said. Then she laughed quickly. “But you mustn’t get mournful when you are with me. You’ve all your life before you and you’re going to be frightfully successful and frightfully happy. I shall so enjoy watching you. And now I must really be rushing off. You’ve given me a most delightful time”; and she began to gather up her gloves and the silk purse that hung by a gold chain from her wrist.
Roland could do little work that afternoon; his thoughts wandered from the ledger at his side and from the files of the financial news. And that evening he was more acutely aware than usual of the uncolored dreariness of his home. For him Beatrice was the composite vision of that other world from which the course of his life was endeavoring to lead him. She represented, for him, romance, adventure, the flower and ecstasy of life.
But two days later he felt once again, as he leaned against the taffrail to watch the English coast fade into a dim haze, that he was letting drop from his shoulders the accumulated responsibilities of the past six months. Did it matter then so much what happened to him over there behind that low-lying bank of cloud if he could at any moment step out of his captivity, relinquish his anxieties and enter a world that knew nothing of April or of his parents, that accepted him on his own valuation as a young man with agreeable manners and a comfortable independence? Who that held the keys of his dungeon could be called a prisoner?