his knife into me and puts me on whenever we get to a hard bit. However, as I never do much else I’m able to swot the French all right.
The great bit of news, though, is that I’ve met a girl in the town who I go out for walks with. I’m not really keen on her, and I think I prefer her friend, Betty (we go in couples). Betty’s much older and she’s dark and she makes you blush when she looks at you. Still, Dolly’s very jolly, and we go out for walks every Sunday and have great times. She lets me kiss her as much as I like. Now what do you think of it? Write and tell me at once. Yours ever,
Roland.
Two days later Roland received the following reply:
My Dear Roland—So glad to hear from you again, and many congratulations on your firsts. I had heard about them as a matter of fact, and had been meaning to write to you, but I am very busy just now. April told me about it; she seemed awfully pleased. I must say she was looking jolly pretty; she thinks a lot of you. Sort of hero. If I were you I should think a bit more about her and a little less about your Bettys and Dollys.
I’m looking forward to the holidays. We must manage to have a few good rags somehow. The Saundersons are giving a dance, so that ought to be amusing. Ever yours,
Ralph.
Roland’s comment on this letter was “Jealous little beast.” He wished he hadn’t written to him. And why drag April in? He and April were great friends; they always had been. Once they had imagined themselves sweethearts. When they went out to parties they had always sat next each other during tea and held hands under the table; in general post Roland had often been driven into the center because of a brilliant failure to take the chair that was next to hers. They had kissed sometimes at dances in the shadow of a passage, and once at a party, when they had been pulling crackers, he had slipped on to the fourth finger of her left hand a brass ring that had fallen from the crumpled paper. She still kept that ring, although the days of courtship were over. Roland had altered since he had gone to Fernhurst. But they were great friends, and there was always an idea between the two families that the children might eventually marry. Mr. Whately was, indeed, fond of prefacing some remote speculation about the future with, “By the time Roland and April are married——”
There was no need, Roland felt, for Ralph to have dragged April into the business at all. He was aggrieved, and the whole business seemed again a waste and an encumbrance. Was it worth while? He got ragged in the house, and he had to spend an hour in Howard’s company before he met Dolly at all. Howard was really rather terrible; so conceited, so familiar; and now that he had found an audience he indulged it the whole time. He was at his worst when he attempted sentiment. Once when they were walking back he turned to Roland, in the middle of a soliloquy, with a gesture of profound disdain and resignation.
“But what’s all this after all?” he said. “It’s nothing; it’s pleasant; it passes the time, and we have to have some distractions in this place to keep us going. But it’s not the real thing; there’s all the difference in the world between this and the real thing. A kiss can be anything or nothing; it can raise one to—to any height, or it can be like eating chocolates. I’m not a chap, you know, who really cares for this sort of thing. I’m in love. I suppose you are too.”
And Roland, who did not want to be outdone, confessed that there was someone, “a girl he had known all his life.”
“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-by” 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-by.” 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’ colors.
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 realizing 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 theater 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 armor 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.
“After all,” he said, after a dramatic pause, “how can any one of you who has been a filthy beast at school dare to propose marriage to some pure, clean woman?”
That told; that sentiment was within the range of his comprehension; it was a beautiful idea, a chivalrous idea, worthy, he inappropriately imagined, of Sir Lancelot. He could understand that a knight should come to his lady with glittering armor and an unstained sword. At the time he did not fully appreciate the application of this image: he soon learned, however, that a night spent on one’s knees on the stone floor of a draughty chapel is a cold and lonely prelude to enchantment: a discovery that did not make him the more charitable to those who preferred clean linen and soft down.
It was only to be supposed, therefore, that he would receive Roland’s confidences with disgust. He had always felt a little jealous of April’s obvious preference for his friend, but he had regarded it as the fortune of war and had taken what pleasure
