And in Edwin’s eyes these, too, were wonderful people. At first he had taken them more or less for granted; but gradually he realised the tremendous sacrifices that their life implied: the long hours: the unceasing strain of keeping their temper: the clean, efficient materialism for which they must have sacrificed so much of the obvious beauty of life, committing themselves—for most of them were middle-aged—to an abnegation of the privileges of marriage and motherhood in a cloistral seclusion as complete as that imposed on the useless devotee of some mystical religion. He took it for granted that the life of a nun was useless to any one except herself. . . . Well, this was a religion worth some sacrifice: the religion of humanity. They themselves would only have called it a profession. At first it had seemed to him that their interests were narrow and their lives, of necessity, mean. He had been astonished at the small things that gave them pleasure: a bunch of primroses from a grateful patient; a ride on the top of a bus; a word of commendation from one of the consulting staff; a house-surgeon’s or even a student’s compliment; and, above all, the passionate attachments and enmities that made up the life of the nunnery in which they lived: but in the end he began to sympathise with them in the humility of their pleasures, to feel that anything might be forgiven to creatures who had made so great a sacrifice. In a mild way he idealised them; and for this reason they decided that he was “quite a nice boy.” III In the winter of his third year Edwin’s newly formulated enthusiasm for humanity in the bulk suffered something of a check. The hospital absorbed him so completely that in those days he saw very little of the city, going to and from his lectures and his work in the Pathological Laboratory at the University without taking any real share in the life of North Bromwich, or being aware of the passions and interests that swayed the city’s heart. Coming down from the hospital, one evening in December, he suddenly became conscious of a constriction in the traffic which grew more acute as it reached the narrows that debouch upon the open space in front of the town hall; and while he was wondering what could be the cause of this, a huge rumour of voices, not unlike that which proceeds from a Midland football crowd when it disapproves of a referee, but deeper and more malignant, reached his ears.