e medical profession, and naturally
there are some who are lazy and reckless. They think it is an easy life,
idle away a couple of years; and then, because their funds come to an end
or because angry parents refuse any longer to support them, drift away
from the hospital. Others find the examinations too hard for them; one
failure after another robs them of their nerve; and, panic-stricken, they
forget as soon as they come into the forbidding buildings of the Conjoint
Board the knowledge which before they had so pat. They remain year after
year, objects of good-humoured scorn to younger men: some of them crawl
through the examination of the Apothecaries Hall; others become
non-qualified assistants, a precarious position in which they are at the
mercy of their employer; their lot is poverty, drunkenness, and Heaven
only knows their end. But for the most part medical students are
industrious young men of the middle-class with a sufficient allowance to
live in the respectable fashion they have been used to; many are the sons
of doctors who have already something of the professional manner; their
career is mapped out: as soon as they are qualified they propose to apply
for a hospital appointment, after holding which (and perhaps a trip to the
Far East as a ship's doctor), they will join their father and spend the
rest of their days in a country practice. One or two are marked out as
exceptionally brilliant: they will take the various prizes and
scholarships which are open each year to the deserving, get one
appointment after another at the hospital, go on the staff, take a
consulting-room in Harley Street, and, specialising in one subject or
another, become prosperous, eminent, and titled.

The medical profession is the only one which a man may enter at any age
with some chance of making a living. Among the men of Philip's year were
three or four who were past their first youth: one had been in the Navy,
from which according to report he had been dismissed for drunkenness; he
was a man of thirty, with a red face, a brusque manner, and a loud voice.
Another was a married man with two children, who had lost money through a
defaulting solicitor; he had a bowed look as if the world were too much
for him; he went about his work silently, and it was plain that he found
it difficult at his age to commit facts to memory. His mind worked slowly.
His effort at application was painful to see.

Philip made himself at home in his tiny r