“Well, I suppose in time if you work well you would become a manager. If you do anything really brilliant you might be given some post of central organization.”
“But it is not very likely, is it, father?” said Roland.
The years seemed mapped out before him and he found it difficult to maintain his pose of complacent satisfaction, so that one evening, when he felt more than ordinarily depressed, and when the need of sympathy became irresistible, he found himself telling April the story of his trouble.
She listened to him quietly, sitting huddled up in the window-seat, her knees drawn up towards her, her hands clasped beneath them. She said nothing for a while after he had finished.
“Well,” he said at last, “that’s the story. You know all about it now.”
She looked up at him. There was in her eyes neither annoyance nor repulsion nor contempt, but only interest and sympathy.
“I don’t know,” he said. And because this happened to be the real reason, and because he felt it to be inadequate, he searched his memory for some more plausible account.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed to happen this way: Things were awfully dull at school, and then, during the Christmas holidays, we had that row. If it hadn’t been for that I think I should have chucked it up altogether. But you didn’t seem to care for me; it didn’t seem to matter much either way; and--well one drifts into these things.”
“But I don’t understand, Roland. Do you mean to say if we hadn’t had that row at Christmas nothing of this would have happened?”
Because their disagreement had not been without its influence on Roland’s general attitude towards his school romance, and because Roland was always at the mercy of the immediate influence, and in the presence of April was unable to think that anything but April could have influenced him, he mistook the part for the whole, and assured her that if they had not had that quarrel at the dance he would have given up Dolly altogether. And because the situation was one they had often met in plays and stories they accepted it as the truth.
“It’s all my fault,” she said, “really all my fault.” And turning her head away from him she allowed her thoughts to travel back to that ineffectual hour of loneliness and resignation. “I can do nothing, nothing myself,” she said. “I can only spoil things for other people.”