"What's the matter, darling? Wasn't it a success? Didn't you do well over there?"
And behind her evident anxiety Roland detected, or fancied that he could detect, the suggestion of a hope that he had not done so well as he had expected.
"She would like to have comforted me," he thought. "Her husband has been a failure; he has had to depend upon her and so she has kept his love. She would like me to be the same." And this attitude, although he could understand it, exasperated him. He was aware that through his new friends he had become alienated from her, that she must be lonely now. But what would you? Life went that way.
They had tea together, and though Roland spoke amusingly and with animation about his experiences abroad, their talk was not intimate as it had been. There was nothing said behind and apart from their actual words, and Mrs Whately imagined that he was impatient to see April.
As soon as they had finished tea she suggested that he should go round to her.
"I'm sure you must be longing to see her."
And when he had gone, she sat for a little while in front of the unwashed tea-things thinking how hard it was that a mother should have to yield her son to another woman.
She need not have. Roland, at the moment when she was thinking of him with melancholy regret, was far from being "dissolved in pleasure and soft repose." He was sitting, as he had so often sat before, on the chair beside the window-seat, in which April was forlornly curled, while Mrs Curtis expressed, to complete his depression, her opinion on the economic situation in Europe. Soon she abandoned these matters of high finance and reverted to simple matters of to-day—namely, her son and her daughter. It was "dear April" and "dear Arthur"; and Roland was reminded vividly of a bawdy house in Brussels and the old woman who had sat beside the fire, exhibiting her wares. That was what Mrs Curtis was at heart. He could see her two thousand years earlier administering in some previous existence to the lusts of Roman soldiery: "Yes, a dear girl, Flavia; and Julia, she's nice; and if you like them plump Portia's a dear, sweet girl—so loving. Dacius Cassius said to me only yesterday...." Yes, that was what she was, and beneath her sentimentality how cold, how hard, how merciless, like that woman in Brussels who had taken eighty per cent. of the girls' money. He was continuing to draw comparisons with a vindictive pleasure when he observed that she was collecting her knitting preparatory to a move.
"But I know you two'll want to be together. I won't be a troublesome chaperon," she was saying; "I'll get out of your way. I expect you've lots to say to each other."
And before Roland quite knew what was happening he was alone with April. He turned towards her, and as her eyes met his she blushed a little and smiled, a shy, wavering smile that said: "I am here; take me if you want me, I am yours"—a smile that would have been to anyone else indescribably beautiful, but that to Roland, at that moment, appeared childish and absurd. He did not know what to say. He was in no mood for protestations and endearments. He could not act a lie. There was an embarrassing pause. April turned her face away from him. He said nothing, he did nothing. And then very distinctly, very slowly, like a child repeating a lesson: