It was he who first admitted Edwin to the conversation of the compartment, by confessing to him that he had been the despair of doctors since childhood: that three specialists had assured his mother that she would never rear that boy: that in spite of this he had always paid four times as much in doctor’s bills as in income-tax, that in his belief they only kept him alive for what they could get out of him, and that his life had been an unending misery, as harrowing, upon his word, as that of any of the sufferers who were illustrated in the papers holding their backs with kidney complaint, until his missus had said: “Don’t throw any more money away on these doctors, John, I’ll have a talk with Mr. Ingleby,” . . . and with the aid of Ingleby’s Asthma Cure he had become relatively whole. Evidently he knew who Edwin was. “What do you think of that now?” he wheezed, and covered the embarrassment into which Edwin was immediately thrown by not waiting for his reply and continuing: “I suppose, now, you’ll be learning to be a chemist like your father?” “No . . . I’m a medical student. I’m going to be a doctor.” “Well . . . I’ll be damned,” said the asthmatical person. He did not say why; but the looks of the superior bank clerk, who immediately lowered his paper and stared at Edwin as though it were his duty to decide whether Edwin were a fit person to enter a learned profession or not, and then contemptuously went on with his reading, supplied the kind of commentary that might have been intended. When the asthmatical subject said that he was damned, the gentleman with the bloated complexion and the fawn-coloured bowler, who always opened his morning paper with fingers that trembled, either with excitement or as a result of the night before, at the column headed Turf Topics, gave a snigger and spat on the floor to conceal it. And the articled clerk, at this display of ill breeding, turned up his nose. It was a strange little company that assembled in the second-class smoker every morning; and the strangest part of it, to Edwin, was the fact that each of them, entrenched, as it were, behind his morning paper, affected a frigid disinterest, yet eagerly listened to the conversation and eagerly scrutinised the appearance of the others. All of them had their little fixed habits. In one place they put their gloves: in another their umbrellas. Every morning they began to read their papers at the same column and folded them at the same point in the journey. They seemed just as regular in their habits as the wheels of the carriage in which they travelled, revolving and stopping and shunting and being braked at an identical time and place for six days out of the seven.