“I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed to happen this way: Things were awfully dull at school, and then, during the Christmas holidays, we had that row. If it hadn’t been for that I think I should have chucked it up altogether. But you didn’t seem to care for me; it didn’t seem to matter much either way; and—well one drifts into these things.”
There was another pause.
“But I don’t understand, Roland. Do you mean to say if we hadn’t had that row at Christmas nothing of this would have happened?”
Because their disagreement had not been without its influence on Roland’s general attitude towards his school romance, and because Roland was always at the mercy of the immediate influence, and in the presence of April was unable to think that anything but April could have influenced him, he mistook the part for the whole, and assured her that if they had not had that quarrel at the dance he would have given up Dolly altogether. And because the situation was one they had often met in plays and stories they accepted it as the truth.
“It’s all my fault,” she said, “really all my fault.” And turning her head away from him she allowed her thoughts to travel back to that ineffectual hour of loneliness and resignation. “I can do nothing, nothing myself,” she said. “I can only spoil things for other people.”
At the time Roland was disappointed, but two hours later he decided that he was, on the whole, relieved that Mrs. Curtis should have chosen that particular moment to return from her afternoon call. In another moment he would have been saying things that would have complicated life most confoundedly. April had been very near tears; he disliked heroics. He would have had to do something to console her. He would probably have said to her a great many things that at the time would have seemed to him true, but which afterwards he would have regretted. He had sufficient worries of his own already.
At home life was not made easy for Roland. He received little sympathy. Ralph told him that he deserved all he had got and had been lucky to get off so cheaply. His father repeated a number of moral platitudes, the source of which Roland was able to recognize.
“After all,” said Mr. Whately, “I have been in a bank all my life; I have not done badly in it, and you, with your education and advantages, should be able to do much better.”
This was a line of argument which did not appeal to Roland. He was very fond of his father, but he had always regarded his manner of life as a fate, at all costs, to be avoided. And though his mother in his presence endeavored to make him believe that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, when she was alone with her husband she saw only her son’s point of view.
“If this is all we have got to offer him,” she said, “all the money and time we have spent will be wasted. If a desk at a bank is going to be the end of it, he might just as well have gone to a day school, and all the extra money we have spent could have been put away for him in a bank.”