"But you don't want a girl you've known all your life; love's not a thing that we drift into; it must be sudden; it must be unexpected; it must hurt."
Howard was a sore trial, and it was with the most unutterable relief that Roland learned that he was leaving at Christmas to go to a crammer's.
"We must keep up with one another, old fellow," Howard said on their last Sunday. "You must come and lunch with me one day in town. Write and tell me all about it. We've had some jolly times."
Roland caught a glimpse of him on the last day, resplendent in an O.F. scarf, very loud and hearty, saying "good-bye" to people he had hardly spoken to before. "You'll write to me, won't you, old fellow? Come and lunch with me when you're up in town. The Regent Club. Good-bye." Since his first year, when the prefect for whom he had fagged, and by whom he had been beaten several times, had left, Roland had never been so heartily thankful to see any member of the school in old boys' colours.
[CHAPTER III]
RALPH AND APRIL
Ralph Richmond was the son of an emotional woman and he had read too many novels. He took himself seriously: without being religious, he considered that it was the duty of every man to leave the world better than he found it. Such a philosophy may be natural to a man of thirty-six who sees small prospect of realising his own ambition, and resorts to the consolation of a collective enthusiasm, but it is abnormal in a boy of seventeen, an age which usually sees itself in the stalls of a theatre waiting for the curtain to rise and reveal a stage set with limitless opportunities for self-development and self-indulgence.
But Ralph had been brought up in an atmosphere of ideals; at the age of seven he gave a performance of Hamlet in the nursery, and in the same year he visited a lenten performance of Everyman. At his preparatory school he came under the influence of an empire builder, who used to appeal to the emotions of his form. "The future of the country is in your hands," he would say. "One day you will be at the helm. You must prepare yourselves for that time. You must never forget." And Ralph did not. He thought of himself as the arbiter of destinies. He felt that till that day his life must be a vigil. Like the knights of Arthurian romance, he would watch beside his armour in the chapel. In the process he became a prig, and on his last day at Rycroft Lodge he became a prude. His headmaster gave all the boys who were leaving a long and serious address on the various temptations of the flesh to which they would be subjected at their Public Schools. Ralph had no clear idea of what these temptations might be. Their results, however, seemed sufficient reason for abstention. If he yielded to them, he gathered that he would lose in a short time his powers of thought, his strength, his moral stamina; a slow poison would devour him; in a few years he would be mad and blind and probably, though of this he was not quite certain, deaf as well. At any rate he would be in a condition when the ability of detecting sound would be of slight value. These threats were alarming: their effect, however, would not have been lasting in the case of Ralph, who was no coward and also, being no fool, would have soon observed that this process of disintegration was not universal in its application. No; it was not the threat that did the damage: it was the romantic appeal of the headmaster's peroration.