Edwin soon became absorbed in the routine of the first year student’s life, and had very little time to think about anything else. He had to work hard to keep pace with it, and the realisation of this was a striking lesson to him. At St. Luke’s he had found that his advance in knowledge made the work progressively more easy. Here he was breaking new ground from the beginning, acquiring knowledge of a kind that owed nothing to general culture and came to him none the easier for his possession of it. The only things in his new work that seemed easy and logical to him were those scientific names that were derived from Latin and Greek. Otherwise the very rudiments and nature of the subjects were new to him. The most astonishing part of the whole business was the way in which the formidable assembly that had glared at him, as he imagined, outside the Dean’s office, simplified itself. He had been prepared to find them creatures of a different tissue from himself, and particularly such apparitions as Harrop and the immense Brown. He soon saw that as far as the career of Medicine was concerned they were identically in the same box as himself: that neither knowledge of the world nor elegance of attire could help either of them to acquire the absolute knowledge that was the one thing essential to success. It made no matter that these two approached the same problem from essentially different angles: Brown with his earnest brows knitted and a look of indomitable but baffled determination; Harrop as though the issue didn’t really matter as long as the crease in his trousers was in the right place; but in either case Edwin saw that they had to work as hard or harder than he did. His first acquaintance, Martin, who was now becoming his friend, since the work that they shared in common bridged the social gulf of which Edwin alone was aware, seemed to possess the faculty of doing things and learning facts almost in spite of himself. He was not in any way brilliant, but he had a way with him and a certain shrewdness that not infrequently underlies the superficial indolence of the Celt. Above all things Edwin found him good company, for the picturesqueness of his brogue and a sense of humour, not of the verbal kind in which Edwin himself dealt, but the broader humour that arises from situations, and personal characteristics, made his society a peculiar joy. At the first lecture on Chemistry, a dull dissertation on first principles, Edwin had gravitated to the seat next to him, and for the rest of the term they kept the same places and afterwards compared notes. Edwin couldn’t help liking him, even though he was conscious of the radical social misunderstanding that underlay their friendship.