At the time Roland was disappointed, but two hours later he decided that he was, on the whole, relieved that Mrs. Curtis should have chosen that particular moment to return from her afternoon call. In another moment he would have been saying things that would have complicated life most confoundedly. April had been very near tears; he disliked heroics. He would have had to do something to console her. He would probably have said to her a great many things that at the time would have seemed to him true, but which afterwards he would have regretted. He had sufficient worries of his own already.
At home life was not made easy for Roland. He received little sympathy. Ralph told him that he deserved all he had got and had been lucky to get off so cheaply. His father repeated a number of moral platitudes, the source of which Roland was able to recognize.
“After all,” said Mr. Whately, “I have been in a bank all my life; I have not done badly in it, and you, with your education and advantages, should be able to do much better.”
This was a line of argument which did not appeal to Roland. He was very fond of his father, but he had always regarded his manner of life as a fate, at all costs, to be avoided. And though his mother in his presence endeavored to make him believe that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, when she was alone with her husband she saw only her son’s point of view.
“If this is all we have got to offer him,” she said, “all the money and time we have spent will be wasted. If a desk at a bank is going to be the end of it, he might just as well have gone to a day school, and all the extra money we have spent could have been put away for him in a bank.”
Mr. Whately reminded her that the change in their plans was due entirely to Roland.
“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” she said, “that is all very well. But it is a cruel shame that a boy’s whole life should depend on a thing he does when he is seventeen years old.”
Mr. Whately murmured something about it being the way of the world, adding he himself had been in a bank now for thirty years.
“Which is the very reason,” said Mrs. Whately, “that I don’t want my son to go into one”--an argument that did not touch her husband.