Edwin felt the weight of a new responsibility, reflecting that in his future life he would in all probability become possessed of many such secrets and that there might be occasions on which his sense of duty would be divided between the traditional discretion of Hippocrates and the instincts of humanity. He invented a hypothetical case for his own confusion. Supposing he had a sister to whom Griffin was engaged: supposing that they were going to be married in a week after this uncomfortable knowledge had come into his possession, endangering the whole of her future happiness and perhaps her life: what, in that case, should be his attitude towards the question of professional secrecy? What would he do? Would he be justified in telling her what he knew? Hippocrates said “No”; but Hippocrates’ refusal narrowed the field of possibilities to confronting Griffin with his own shame and threatening him with . . . what? Not with exposure—for that Hippocrates forbade. Obviously with death. And that would be murder. . . . Balancing the relative heinousness of murder and perjury, Edwin began to laugh at himself, and while he did this a curious reminiscence came into his mind: the picture of a small boy, who resembled him in very little but had been himself, lying in the hedge side of Murderer’s Cross Road, on the downs above St. Luke’s, reflecting on the same problem of the justification of homicide and saying to himself as he brooded on his wrongs: “I can quite easily understand a chap wanting to murder a chap.” And this picture tempting him further, he relapsed into a dream of those strange, remote days tinged with extremes of happiness and misery, and both of them unreal. . . . He thought no more of Griffin. CHAPTER IX EASY ROW I FOR a whole year Edwin inhabited the room above the lock-up surgery in Lower Sparkdale. It was a happy year, for into it was crowded a great wealth of experience and elevating discovery to which the mechanical drudgery of Dr. Harris’s dispensing room acted as ballast. In his medical studies he began to feel for the first time the fruits of his earlier labours: to realise that all medicine was little more than an intelligent application to life of the theoretical subjects that he had mastered without reasoning. From the very first day of his experience in the dissecting room there was nothing in all that he had learnt that had not its direct bearing on his present practice; and the reflection that he possessed all this essential knowledge ready for use was exhilarating in itself. Again, the fact that he was now standing on his feet, actually earning his own living, gave him a greater happiness than he had ever known in his days of dependence; it made him accept the routine of Lower Sparkdale as a penance, cheering him with the thought that so much sacrifice was really necessary before he should be master of himself.