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.
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.