earn
something at once. If he had been qualified, even with a club-foot, he
could have gone out to the Cape, since the demand for medical men was now
great. Except for his deformity he might have enlisted in one of the
yeomanry regiments which were constantly being sent out. He went to the
secretary of the Medical School and asked if he could give him the
coaching of some backward student; but the secretary held out no hope of
getting him anything of the sort. Philip read the advertisement columns of
the medical papers, and he applied for the post of unqualified assistant
to a man who had a dispensary in the Fulham Road. When he went to see him,
he saw the doctor glance at his club-foot; and on hearing that Philip was
only in his fourth year at the hospital he said at once that his
experience was insufficient: Philip understood that this was only an
excuse; the man would not have an assistant who might not be as active as
he wanted. Philip turned his attention to other means of earning money. He
knew French and German and thought there might be some chance of finding
a job as correspondence clerk; it made his heart sink, but he set his
teeth; there was nothing else to do. Though too shy to answer the
advertisements which demanded a personal application, he replied to those
which asked for letters; but he had no experience to state and no
recommendations: he was conscious that neither his German nor his French
was commercial; he was ignorant of the terms used in business; he knew
neither shorthand nor typewriting. He could not help recognising that his
case was hopeless. He thought of writing to the solicitor who had been his
father's executor, but he could not bring himself to, for it was contrary
to his express advice that he had sold the mortgages in which his money
had been invested. He knew from his uncle that Mr. Nixon thoroughly
disapproved of him. He had gathered from Philip's year in the accountant's
office that he was idle and incompetent.

"I'd sooner starve," Philip muttered to himself.

Once or twice the possibility of suicide presented itself to him; it would
be easy to get something from the hospital dispensary, and it was a
comfort to think that if the worst came to the worst he had at hand means
of making a painless end of himself; but it was not a course that he
considered seriously. When Mildred had left him to go with Griffiths his
anguish had been so great that he wanted to die in order to get rid of