He used to go back to Mr. Moon’s tutorials convinced that he knew all that was to be known of the subject in hand, and then Bobby, in his slow Lancashire voice, with broadened “a”s and “u”s, would put to him some leisurely question that showed him that he knew nothing. Very decorously and slowly these questions would be asked; and since the answers were concerned with the dryest and most exact of physical facts, guessing was of no help to him and silence the only refuge of the ignorant. No display either of knowledge or ignorance had the least effect on Bobby Moon. His wide and dreamy face showed no emotion on the discovery of either. On very rare occasions he would descend to a kind of ponderous verbal humour, slow and elephantine, like the humour of Beethoven; but even in these moments his face showed no signs of emotion, and he would pass on without waiting for any recognition of his joke to the next lethargic question. “Mr. Harrop,” he would say slowly, “what is the fotty pod of Hovers?” And Harrop, sitting on a high stool that showed his variegated socks to perfection, would reply that the fatty pad of Havers was a small cushion of fat set in the head of the femur to lubricate the hollow of the acetabulum. The picturesque figure of Moon soon began to dominate Edwin’s impressions of the dissecting room. There was something provocative in the remoteness of this black and solitary form from all the concerns of human life. Edwin conceived him to be a kind of cerebral abstraction, no man, but an advanced text-book of anatomy; curiously endowed with the powers of locomotion and speech but bereft of any human characteristic. It amazed him to discover, in the end, that Bobby Moon was nothing of the sort, but a creature of the most delicate human tenderness, so sensitive to the appeals of beauty and humanity that he had been forced to adopt the impassive mask that was all that his pupils knew of him from an instinct of self-protection.