In the human wreckage of the casualty department there was no great variety; but all of it was new to Edwin and W.G., and they threw themselves into the labour with enthusiasm, working so hard from nine o’clock till one, that their backs ached and they lost all sense of the passage of time. Mather himself seemed to them a prodigy of skilfulness, so swift in his decisions, so certain and adroit in the work of his hands. Even the sister, whom Edwin had originally regarded as a mere woman, aroused their admiration by the ease with which she worked and her invincible good humour. Edwin found that she could teach him more than his male superiority would ever have dreamed. Little by little the astounding confusion of their work began to seem more simple. Bandages, that had seemed condemned to unsightly ruckles, or liable to fall unrolled upon the dirty floor, began to fold themselves in symmetrical designs. Edwin and W.G. vied with one another in the neatness of their dressings. The smell of the place, that had seemed at first to fester beneath an unconvincing veil of carbolic and iodoform, now seemed natural to their nostrils, even pleasant in its familiarity. Edwin began to have time to look about him, to form individual attachments to the patients who came there every day, to take a particular interest in cases that he regarded as his own. Gradually, from the mass of evil-smelling humanity, personalities began to emerge and even intimacies that were flattering because they implied a trust in his own imperfect skill. He did not know the names of his patients any more than they knew his. To him they were grouped under conventional generics: Daddy, Granny, Tommy, Polly, and the like. To them he was always “Doctor”; but the thing that made them human and lovable to him was the sense of their dependence on him; and the preference for his attentions that was sometimes timidly expressed, gave him a flush of gratification deeper than any he had ever known. It pleased him to think that it was true when his patients told him that he dressed them more gently than the other workers in the casualty department. Such confidences almost convinced him that he had found a vocation. After lunch Edwin and W.G. would talk over their cases together in the lounge of the Dousita. Maskew, who still met them every day at this resort, found their conversation boring, and fell back more and more upon the charms of Miss Wheeler, who did not seem to have varied by a single hairpin since the day of their first acquaintance. And from the discussion of their individual cases, W.G. would sometimes pass on to the more general questions that their work aroused.