"I was talking to April about it this morning," said Mrs Curtis. "Of course I've noticed it for a long time. A mother can't help seeing these things. Several times I've said to my husband: 'Father, dear, haven't you noticed that Roland and April are becoming very interested in each other?' and he's agreed with me. Though I haven't liked to say anything. But then this morning it was so very plain, wasn't it?" She paused and smiled. And Roland, feeling that an answer was expected of him, said that he supposed it was.
"Yes, really quite clear, and so afterwards I had a talk with my little April and she told me all about it. And, of course, we're all of us very pleased that you should be fond of one another, but you must realise that at present you're much too young for there to be any talk of marriage."
"But..." Roland began.
"Yes, I know that you've got a good post in this varnish factory; but as I was saying to Mr Whately before you came, you're only on probation, and it's a job that means a lot of travelling and expense that you wouldn't be able to afford if you were a married man or were even contemplating matrimony."
"But..." Roland began again, and again Mrs Curtis stopped him.
"Yes, I know what you're thinking; you say that you are content to wait; that four years, five years, six years—it's nothing to you, that you want to be engaged now. I can quite understand it. We all can. We've all been young, but I'm quite certain that..."
Roland could not believe that it was real, that he was sitting in a real room, that a real woman was talking, a real scene was in the process of enaction. He listened in a stupefied amazement. What, after all, had happened? He had kissed April three times. She had asked no vows and he had given none. They were lovers he supposed, but they were boy and girl lovers. The romances of the nursery should not be taken seriously. By holding April's hand and kissing her had he decided the course of both their lives? What were they about, these three solemn people, with their talk of marriage and engagements?
"But you don't understand," he began.
"Oh, yes, we do," Mrs Curtis interrupted. "We old people know more than you think."
And she began to speak in her droning, mellifluous voice of the sanctity of love and of the good fortune that had led him so early to his affinity. And then all three of them began to speak together, and their words beat like hammers upon Roland's head, till he did not know where he was, nor what they were saying to him. "It can't be real," he told himself. "It's preposterous. People don't behave like this in real life." And when his mother came across and kissed him on the forehead and said, "We're all so happy, Roland," he employed every desperate device to recall himself to reality that he was accustomed to use when involved in a nightmare. He fixed his thoughts upon one issue, focused all his powers on that one point: "I will wake up. I will wake up."