They were pleasant days. Edwin, in spite of his lightness, had now found a place in the scrum of the second fifteen, and on Saturday evenings, when both of them were drugged with their weekly debauch of exercise, he and W.G. would meet at the diggings in Easy Row, and after a steaming hot bath, in the process of which Edwin never failed to be impressed by the immensity of his friend’s physique, they would set off down the town together and make a tremendous meal at the Coliseum grill: Porterhouse steak with chipped potatoes and huge silver tankards of bitter ale. Then they would go on together to a theatre or a music hall, too pleasantly dulled, too mildly elated to question the humour of the most second-rate comedian. After the show W.G. would walk down to the station with Edwin, and see him off into the last train for Halesby, and Edwin, leaning out of the carriage window, would see the big man turn and go clumsily along the platform with the gait that he had noticed on the very first day of his life as a medical student. Brown was a wonderful fellow. In half an hour, Edwin reflected, when his train was still puffing away through the dark, W.G. would be back in his diggings with a clay pipe stuck in his mouth and a huge text-book of Anatomy open on his knees, driving facts into that puzzled brain with the violent thoroughness of an engine that drives piles. When the last train arrived at Halesby, the town would be in darkness, for, in the black country in those days the only places of amusement were the public houses and these had been shut for an hour or more. Only from the upper windows of innumerable mean dwellings lights would be seen, and sometimes the voice of a drunken husband heard grumbling. But the path beside the fish-ponds was beautiful, even on a winter night, and Edwin would feel glad as he plodded along it that he didn’t live in North Bromwich, where the night noises of the country were never heard. So he would pass quietly up the empty lane, his footsteps echoing on the hard pavement, and come at last to the little house set in the midst of shrubberies that smelt of winter. Very humble and quiet, and even pitiable it seemed after the glaring streets of the city that he had left behind.