The tribute was flattering. Edwin, always rather pathetically anxious for friendship, was particularly pleased to have it offered so frankly by a creature as unlike him in every way as W.G. There was something stable and reliable about the big man’s simplicity. He felt that he would be as loath to give offence to W.G. as to his father; and though he still felt some indefinite hankerings after the atmosphere of culture that he would have enjoyed in the society of Boyce, he couldn’t deny the fact that W.G. was a sound and splendid fellow, and a good man to have by his side in an emergency. Together they plunged into the new world of hospital life. II Two general hospitals supplied the clinical needs of the North Bromwich Medical School. The older, from which the school had originated, was a small institution, the Prince’s, with which Edwin had become acquainted on the occasion of his first panto-night. It stood in the upper and healthier part of the city, in the middle of the slums that lie upon the fringe of the fashionable suburb of Alvaston: a solid building of early Victorian red brick, with a stone portico facing upon a thoroughfare of rather older houses that had once been reputable but had now degenerated into theatrical lodging-houses. The hospital itself was small enough to be homely, and W.G. and Edwin soon became accustomed to its narrow entrance hall, and the lodge in which porters, who already knew all that was to be known about the reception of casualties, were housed. Edwin would arrive at the hospital early in the morning, when no sign of life was to be seen in the “professional” lodgings sleeping with drawn blinds upon the other side of the road. At this time of the day the hospital porch smelt clean and antiseptic, for the stream of stinking humanity had not yet begun to trickle through. He would hang his coat in the narrow passage that served for cloakroom and lounge with a cigarette in his mouth before the glass-fronted notice-boards on which the lists of operations for the day were exhibited, and exchange greetings with the night porter departing in a state of drowsy ill-temper, or the day-porter coming on duty with a military swagger and his grey hair plastered down with vaseline, from the casualty department, and cold water.