traveller, who uses Cook’s tickets because they
save trouble, but looks with good-humoured contempt
on the personally conducted parties. The free
man can do no wrong. He does everything he likes—if
he can. His power is the only measure of his morality.
He recognises the laws of the state and he can break
them without sense of sin, but if he is punished he
accepts the punishment without rancour. Society
has the power.
But if for the individual there was no right and no
wrong, then it seemed to Philip that conscience lost
its power. It was with a cry of triumph that
he seized the knave and flung him from his breast.
But he was no nearer to the meaning of life than he
had been before. Why the world was there and
what men had come into existence for at all was as
inexplicable as ever. Surely there must be some
reason. He thought of Cronshaw’s parable
of the Persian carpet. He offered it as a solution
of the riddle, and mysteriously he stated that it
was no answer at all unless you found it out for yourself.
“I wonder what the devil he meant,” Philip
smiled.
And so, on the last day of September, eager to put
into practice all these new theories of life, Philip,
with sixteen hundred pounds and his club-foot, set
out for the second time to London to make his third
start in life.
The examination Philip had passed before he was articled
to a chartered accountant was sufficient qualification
for him to enter a medical school. He chose St.
Luke’s because his father had been a student
there, and before the end of the summer session had
gone up to London for a day in order to see the secretary.
He got a list of rooms from him, and took lodgings
in a dingy house which had the advantage of being within
two minutes’ walk of the hospital.
“You’ll have to arrange about a part to
dissect,” the secretary told him. “You’d
better start on a leg; they generally do; they seem
to think it easier.”
Philip found that his first lecture was in anatomy,
at eleven, and about half past ten he limped across
the road, and a little nervously made his way to the
Medical School. Just inside the door a number
of notices were pinned up, lists of lectures, football
fixtures, and the like; and these he looked at idly,
trying to seem at his ease. Young men and boys
dribbled in and looked for letters in the rack, chatted
with one another, and passed downstairs to the basement,
in which was the student’s reading-room.
Philip saw several fellows with a desultory, timid
look dawdling around, and surmised that, like himself,
they were there for the first time. When he had
exhausted the notices he saw a glass door which led
into what was apparently a museum, and having still
twenty minutes to spare he walked in. It was
a collection of pathological specimens. Presently
a boy of about eighteen came up to him.
“I say, are you first year?” he said.
