I believe that this programme was carried through, more or less to the letter. Certain it is that I myself overheard another of Bill's grim pleasantries. He was explaining to madame that they must apprentice their offspring to the engineering trade. "I wanter mike Lil' Bill a mowter chap, so's 'e can oil the ball-bearings of me fancy leg wot I'm ter get at Roehampton." The "fancy leg" ended by being the favourite theme of Bill's disgraceful extravaganzas. He would announce to Sister, when she was dressing his stump, that he had been studying means of earning his living in the future, and had decided to become a professor of roller skating. He would loudly tell his wife that she would never again be able to summons him for assault by kicking: the fancy leg would not give the real one sufficient purchase for an effective kick. And she was not to complain, in future, about his cold feet against her back in bed: there would be only one cold foot, the other would be unhitched and on the floor. And of course there were endless jokes about what had been done with the amputated leg, whether it had got a tombstone, and so forth: some of the suggestions going a trifle beyond what good taste, in more fastidious coteries, would have thought permissible. But Bill had his own ideas of the humorous, and maybe his own no less definite ideas of dignity. In this latter virtue I counted the fact that although once or twice, when he was very low, he gave way to a little fretting to me, he never, I am convinced, let fall one querulous word in the presence of his wife. She sat by her husband's side, and when things were at their worst the two said naught. The wife numbly watched her Bill's face, turning now and then to glance at the activities of little Bill with his engine, or to smile her thanks to the patients who sometimes came and gave the child pickaback rides. When I intruded, I knew I was interrupting the communings of a loving and happily married pair; and the "slangings" of each other which signalised Bill's recovery and his wife's relief, did nothing to shake my certitude that, like many slum dwellers, they owned a mutual esteem which other couples, of superior station, might envy. Personally I have never known a cockney patient who did not evoke affection; and as a matter of curiosity I have been asking a number of Sisters whether they liked to have cockneys in their wards. Without a single exception (and let me say that Sisters are both observant and critical) the answers have been enthusiastically in the affirmative. XIII THE STATION PARTY