"So that is what you have been looking forward to for over a month," she said to herself, as he passed out of sight behind an angle of the road. "This is the date you wanted to mark upon your calendar with a red cross. Little fool. What did you think you were doing? And what has it turned out to be in the end? Five minutes' discussion of indifferent things. A fine event to make such a fuss about; and what else did you expect?"
She was not bitter. It was one of those mild days that in early spring surprise us with a promise of summer, on which the heart is stirred with the crowded glory of life and the sense of widening horizons. The long stretch of roofs and chimney stacks became beautiful in the subdued sunlight. It was an hour that in the strong might have quickened the hunger for adventure, but that to April brought a mood of chastened, quiet resignation. She appreciated, as she had not done before, the tether by which her scope was measured. For the last month she had made Roland's return a focus for the ambitions and desires and yearnings towards an intenser way of living, for which of herself she had been unable to find expression. This, in a confused manner, she understood. "I can do nothing by myself. I have to live in other people. And what I am now I shall be always. All my life I shall be dependent on someone else, or on some interest that is outside myself. And whether I am happy or unhappy depends upon some other person. That is my nature, and I cannot go beyond my nature." When she reached home she sat for a long time in the window-seat, her hands folded in her lap. "This will be my whole life," she said. "I am not of those who may go out in search of happiness." And she thought that if romance did not come to her, she would remain all her life sitting at a window. "Of myself I can do nothing."
[CHAPTER VII]
A SORRY BUSINESS
April did not see very much of Roland during the holidays, and was not, on the whole, sorry. Now that the hysterical excitement over his return had passed, she judged it better to let their friendship lapse. She did not want any repetition of that disastrous evening, and thought that it would be easier to resume their friendship on its old basis after the long interval of the summer term. Roland was still a little piqued by what he considered her absurd behaviour, and had resolved to let the first step come from her.
This estrangement was a disappointment to his people.
"Have you noticed, my dear, that Roland's hardly been round to the Curtises' at all these holidays?" Mr Whately said to his wife one evening. "I hope there has not been a row or anything. I rather wish you'd try and find out."
And so next day Mrs Whately made a guarded remark to her son about April's appearance: "What a big girl she's getting. And she's prettier every day. If you're not careful you'll have all the boys in the place running after her and cutting you out."