But the battle appeared hopeless. The forces were so strong that were marshaled against him. What chance did he stand against that mingled appeal of sentiment and habit? All that spring he felt himself standing upon a rapidly crumbling wall. Whenever he went down to Hogstead he kept saying to himself: “Yes, I’m safe now, secure within time and space. But it’s coming. Nothing can stop it. Night follows day, winter summer; one can’t fight against the future, one can’t anticipate it. One has to wait; it chooses its own time and its own place.” At the office he was fretful and absent-minded.
“What’s the matter with you?” Gerald asked him once.
“Oh, but there must be, you’ve been awfully queer the last week or so.”
Roland did not answer, and there was an awkward silence.
“I say, old man, I don’t quite like asking you, but you’re not in debt or anything, are you? Because if you are, I mean”
“Oh, no, really. I’m not even ‘overdrawn.’”
In Gerald’s experience of the world there were two ills to which mankind was heir--money and woman. The subdivisions of these ills were many, but he recognized no other main source. If Roland was not in debt, then there was a woman somewhere, and later in the day he brought the matter up again.
“I say, old son, you’ve not been making an ass of yourself with some woman, have you? No one’s got hold of you, have they?”
“Lord, no!” laughed Roland. “I only wish they had!”
“Touch wood, my son. Don’t insult Providence. You can take my word for it that sooner or later some woman will get hold of you and then it’s the devil, the very devil. Did I ever tell you about the girl at Broadstairs?” And there ensued the description of a seaside amour, followed by some shrewd generalities on the ways of a man with--but to conclude the quotation would be hardly pertinent. At any rate, Gerald told his story and pointed his moral.
“You may take my word for it, adultery is a whacking risk. It’s awfully jolly while it lasts, and you think yourself no end of a dog when you offer the husband a cigar, but sooner or later the wife clings round the bed-post and says: ‘Darling, I have deceived you!’ And then you’re in it, up to the ruddy neck!”
Roland laughed, as he always did, at Gerald’s stories, but it hurt him to think that his friend should have noticed a change in him. If he was altered already by a few weeks of Hammerton, what would he be like in five years’ time after the responsibilities of marriage had had their way with him? And marriage was not for five years, but for fifty.