traveller, who uses Cook’s tickets because they save trouble, but looks with good-humoured contempt on the personally conducted parties.  The free man can do no wrong.  He does everything he likes—­if he can.  His power is the only measure of his morality.  He recognises the laws of the state and he can break them without sense of sin, but if he is punished he accepts the punishment without rancour.  Society has the power.

But if for the individual there was no right and no wrong, then it seemed to Philip that conscience lost its power.  It was with a cry of triumph that he seized the knave and flung him from his breast.  But he was no nearer to the meaning of life than he had been before.  Why the world was there and what men had come into existence for at all was as inexplicable as ever.  Surely there must be some reason.  He thought of Cronshaw’s parable of the Persian carpet.  He offered it as a solution of the riddle, and mysteriously he stated that it was no answer at all unless you found it out for yourself.

“I wonder what the devil he meant,” Philip smiled.

And so, on the last day of September, eager to put into practice all these new theories of life, Philip, with sixteen hundred pounds and his club-foot, set out for the second time to London to make his third start in life.

LIV

The examination Philip had passed before he was articled to a chartered accountant was sufficient qualification for him to enter a medical school.  He chose St. Luke’s because his father had been a student there, and before the end of the summer session had gone up to London for a day in order to see the secretary.  He got a list of rooms from him, and took lodgings in a dingy house which had the advantage of being within two minutes’ walk of the hospital.

“You’ll have to arrange about a part to dissect,” the secretary told him.  “You’d better start on a leg; they generally do; they seem to think it easier.”

Philip found that his first lecture was in anatomy, at eleven, and about half past ten he limped across the road, and a little nervously made his way to the Medical School.  Just inside the door a number of notices were pinned up, lists of lectures, football fixtures, and the like; and these he looked at idly, trying to seem at his ease.  Young men and boys dribbled in and looked for letters in the rack, chatted with one another, and passed downstairs to the basement, in which was the student’s reading-room.  Philip saw several fellows with a desultory, timid look dawdling around, and surmised that, like himself, they were there for the first time.  When he had exhausted the notices he saw a glass door which led into what was apparently a museum, and having still twenty minutes to spare he walked in.  It was a collection of pathological specimens.  Presently a boy of about eighteen came up to him.

“I say, are you first year?” he said.