The women themselves were an interesting sociological study, in so far as he could look beyond the rigid world of the hospital to their probable place in the shifting structure outside. Though their work was cleaning and dishing up food, few of them were the ordinary charwoman type; mostly they were obviously welcoming the chance to earn a little extra money by plying the only trade they knew, yet would have starved rather than become even a ‘lady help’ to another woman, with the personal relation­ship that it would involve. Hospital meant charing as far as work went, but in its social atmosphere it meant something more interesting, more romantic, and, in the long run, more respect­able.

At least one of Charles’s coffee-time circle, however, was free of any such preoccupations. Rosa had taken work at the hospital because it was ‘more like life—you could meet more people and get to see and hear more,’ she confided to Charles as they washed mugs. She was a sturdily built girl of twenty, not pretty, but alive, with a touch of exuberance that proclaimed itself in the big scarlet mouth that she daubed across her already full lips, and the animation of her voice in talk. She found everything interesting, though she was quite without curiosity and never tried to puzzle things out. What was, was, and that was the end of it; but she lived in a perpetual state of deep wonderment, bordering on excitement, that people and things were so various. Charles found her refreshing and slightly comical. She in turn took, he some­times felt, a degree of interest in him that was a shade deeper, even, than her general interest in human personality. He was unlike any other young man she had ever met, and, without trying to account for his differences, she found him absorbing. He knew that when a lively girl of that age finds a man absorbing, it is sometimes not long before she finds him other things as well. While knowing this, he did not know what to do about it, or even whether he wanted to do anything about it.

One day, as he was wheeling a trolley down a corridor, he nearly ran into a young man in a white coat who said, ‘It’s Lumley, isn’t it?’

It was a man who had been at college with him, a medical student, but by some odd chance Charles had never learnt his name. They had only known one another very distantly. Obviously he had either to ask him his name at once, or to pretend for ever that he knew it.

‘Hullo,’ he said. It was too much trouble to ask his name: he would simply have to call him You.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Wheeling these drums down to the theatre.’

The other flushed slightly at Charles’s discourtesy.