“This life’s worth living,” he would say. “When you first take up medicine and spend a couple of years over learning the atomic weights of heavy metals or dissecting the stomach of an earthworm, you begin to wonder what the devil you’re getting at; by Gad, this hospital work opens your eyes. You’re doing something practical. What’s more, you’re doing a job that no professor of classics or stinks could touch, and you see the actual results of your treatment on your patients.” “Thank God, I’m not one of them, W.G.,” said Maskew morosely. “As a matter of fact, it’s no more than when an electrical engineer finds a short circuit and makes a new connection, or when a carpenter makes a job of a rickety staircase.” “That’s all you know about it, my friend,” said W.G. “In our job you’re dealing with human life; you’re relieving physical pain—and sometimes you get thanked for it, which is damned pleasant. And you’ve a responsibility too. If you make a slip the poor devil you’re experimenting on is going to suffer. You may even kill him. And the extraordinary thing is that he trusts you . . .” To Edwin also that was the most extraordinary thing, and, indeed, the most pathetic. It showed him that the practice of medicine imposed an actual moral discipline on those who followed it: an obligation of the most meticulous honour and devotion. But if the discipline of practice demanded much, it repaid a thousandfold. He had his reward not only in the thanks of the scabrous old men whose varicose ulcers, or “bad legs,” as they called them, he dressed, but in the rarer consciousness of actual achievement which came to him more frequently as the scope of his work extended. One case in particular he always remembered, principally because it was the first of the kind. She was a little Jewish tailoress who laboured at piecework in some sweater’s den in the rookeries on the southern side of the hospital. She was not beautiful. Her face had the peculiar ivory pallor, and her whole body the unhealthy brittleness, of plants that have sprouted in a cellar. But her voice was soft, and her hands, the fingertips of which were made callous by the plucking of threads and rough with innumerable needle pricks, were beautifully shaped. A week or so before she had stabbed her left forefinger with an infected needle, and lit a focus of suppuration in the tendon sheath. She had to live, poor thing! and so, for a week she had worked in a state of agony, while the tissues grew tense and shiny with compression, and the pain would not let her sleep. At last, when she could work no longer, she had come to the casualty department, nursing her poisoned hand in a bandana handkerchief. She had not slept for four nights, and was very near to tears.