ooms. He arranged his books and
hung on the walls such pictures and sketches as he possessed. Above him,
on the drawing-room floor, lived a fifth-year man called Griffiths; but
Philip saw little of him, partly because he was occupied chiefly in the
wards and partly because he had been to Oxford. Such of the students as
had been to a university kept a good deal together: they used a variety of
means natural to the young in order to impress upon the less fortunate a
proper sense of their inferiority; the rest of the students found their
Olympian serenity rather hard to bear. Griffiths was a tall fellow, with
a quantity of curly red hair and blue eyes, a white skin and a very red
mouth; he was one of those fortunate people whom everybody liked, for he
had high spirits and a constant gaiety. He strummed a little on the piano
and sang comic songs with gusto; and evening after evening, while Philip
was reading in his solitary room, he heard the shouts and the uproarious
laughter of Griffiths' friends above him. He thought of those delightful
evenings in Paris when they would sit in the studio, Lawson and he,
Flanagan and Clutton, and talk of art and morals, the love-affairs of the
present, and the fame of the future. He felt sick at heart. He found that
it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to abide by its results.
The worst of it was that the work seemed to him very tedious. He had got
out of the habit of being asked questions by demonstrators. His attention
wandered at lectures. Anatomy was a dreary science, a mere matter of
learning by heart an enormous number of facts; dissection bored him; he
did not see the use of dissecting out laboriously nerves and arteries when
with much less trouble you could see in the diagrams of a book or in the
specimens of the pathological museum exactly where they were.

He made friends by chance, but not intimate friends, for he seemed to have
nothing in particular to say to his companions. When he tried to interest
himself in their concerns, he felt that they found him patronising. He was
not of those who can talk of what moves them without caring whether it
bores or not the people they talk to. One man, hearing that he had studied
art in Paris, and fancying himself on his taste, tried to discuss art with
him; but Philip was impatient of views which did not agree with his own;
and, finding quickly that the other's ideas were conventional, grew
monosyllabic. Philip desired popularity