In the duties of the wards Edwin became far more familiar with his cases than in the casualty department. The work was less hurried, and the patients themselves were less fully armed with the conventional social gestures by which men and women protect and hide themselves. They lay in bed helpless, dependent on the hospital staff for every necessity and amusement; and the stress of physical pain, or the catastrophe of a major operation had generally shaken from them the little superficialities that they had gathered to themselves in the course of everyday life. Edwin noticed that, even at their worst, the women were hardly ever too ill to be a little concerned for their personal appearance, and, as they grew better, the patients of both sexes would make an heroic attempt to appear as they wished themselves to seem rather than as they were; but he realised, none the less, that the doctor gets nearer to the bed-rock of human personality than any other man who ministers to humanity. With him, the person into whose hands their suffering bodies were committed in an almost pitiful confidence, they were concerned to hide themselves far less than with any other; and in this triumphant discovery Edwin flattered himself that he was becoming richly learned in human nature. He did not realise how little he had learned. One thing, however, that these days taught him, he never lost in after life: an intense appreciation of the inherent patience and nobility of human beings, the precious ore that the fire of suffering revealed. Even the worst of his patients—in North Bromwich as elsewhere disease is an impartial enemy, falling on the virtuous and abandoned alike—revealed such amazing possibilities of good. In these hospital wards the fundamental gregarious instinct of mankind, with the unselfishness and sympathy that go along with it, asserted itself. The common life of the ward was happy, extraordinarily happy. Removed from the ordinary responsibilities of wage-earning and competition, fed and housed and tended without question, the patients lived together as happily as a community of African savages, supported by the female labour of the nursing staff, obedient to the unquestioned authority of the sister in charge.