W.G. and Edwin found their experience so intriguing that they took turns to visit the casualty department in the afternoons when the work was light, and the absence of Mather gave them a free hand in the performance of minor surgery. At this time of the day the work of the department was more suggestive of its name; for the people who came there were nearly all the victims of sudden illness or accident that needed diagnosis and immediate treatment. It pleased Edwin to deal with these off his own bat, and he spent the long afternoons that were free from lectures in suturing wounds, removing brass filings or specks of cinders from eyes, extracting teeth, gaining confidence every day and suffering the mingled emotions of pain, pity, and violent indignation. Not infrequently the last . . . for he saw so much suffering that might easily have been prevented but for the ignorance or callousness of humanity. These things aroused his anger; but he soon realised that anger was the one emotion that a doctor is most wise to suppress. Sometimes a woman from one of the neighbouring slums would enter in a state of hollow-eyed terror, carrying in her shawl a child that was obviously dying from broncho-pneumonia. “Why, in the name of Heaven, didn’t you come up before?” he would ask indignantly. “The neighbours said it was only the teething, doctor,” she would reply. Edwin would try to suppress an inclination to damn the neighbours upside down. “Surely you could see the child was ill?” he would say. “Yes, doctor, but how could I get away? There’s seven of them, bless their hearts, and me going with another, and the house looking like a pigsty, and the master’s dinner to cook. I haven’t got no time to spare for hospitals.” And he knew that she spoke the truth, contenting himself, as he filled in the form for admission to the children’s ward, with telling her that the diet of bread-crusts soaked in beer, which she had been giving it, was not ideal for a baby eight months old. “Take the baby along to ward fourteen,” he would say, “they’ll do what they can for it,” and be met, as likely as not, with a volume of tigerish abuse from a wild-eyed woman who swore that if her baby was going to die it wasn’t going to do so in any bloody hospital, was it, my pretty?—the last words sinking to a maternal coo and being accompanied by a paroxysm of kisses on the baby’s lips that were already blue for want of breath. And then Edwin would control his indignation and resort to wheedling and coaxing, feeling that if the baby were left to the mercies of maternal instinct, he himself would be little better than a murderer.