He was lonely; but this seemed inevitable, for no person in his senses could be expected to grind along in a steam-tram to Lower Sparkdale for the sake of his company; and the final year was too full of strenuous studies for all of them to allow of much indulgence in the joys of friendship. Matthew Boyce made a few heroic attempts. He even spent several evenings in Harris’s dispensary, finding the shilling doctor’s clinical and commercial methods something of a joke. They were no joke to Edwin: he had recognised long ago that they were no more than Harris’s solution of the problem of living. The doctor saw nothing unworthy in them. He did his best, within his limited knowledge, for his patients. He was kind, and even, on occasion, generous. If there were fault to be found it must be with the State that allowed such ignorant men to deal with precious human bodies, and not with him. When the first humour of the experience was exhausted Boyce came to the surgery no more. Little by little Edwin’s insulation became more complete, and in the end he relapsed into the degree of loneliness that he had known in his early days at St. Luke’s. Given the opportunity, he almost enjoyed it. There was something remote and secret about this little room in the corner house above the grinding trams, and when the surgery emptied at night and he went upstairs to work he would find himself suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of thankfulness for the fact that it was so peculiarly his: that his own books and pictures and clothes had made it individual and different from any other room in the whole of the city. And when the town slept, and he sat on reading into the early hours of the morning, the lonely chamber was like a lighthouse set in seas of night, and dreams of the misty lands beyond Severn, of Mendip couched in darkness, or of the sleeping wolds by Overton, would beat at his lighted window like seabirds in the night. At first the sacrifices that his poverty demanded had seemed no more than part of a new and exciting game. It was some months before he realised that, literally, he could not afford the indulgence of a single pleasure that cost money. If he were to free himself from the bondage of Dr. Harris’s dispensary it was absolutely necessary that he should save enough money to pay his examination fees. He began to find a new delight in carefully hoarded shillings, and this practice threw him into a curious sympathy with his employer. Each of them, on a different scale, was committed to a present sacrifice for the sake of future freedom; and this reflection reconciled him in some degree to the inconveniences that Dr. Harris’s miserly ways inflicted on him.