‘I meant, of course, what are you doing doing this job?’ Annoyance had a poor effect on his syntax.

‘I’ve got to live, haven’t I?’ said Charles in the patient tone of one who is prepared to discuss the matter fully.

This continued coldness ought to have been enough to brush the fellow off, but evidently he had motives for persevering. Perhaps he was lonely and welcomed the sight of a once-familiar face. Or he thought Charles had come down in the world and was anxious to befriend him. The latter was the less likely of the two.

‘Well, let’s be seeing something of you,’ he said. ‘Where do you live?’

Charles wondered whether it would be a legitimate continuation of his surly-independence act if he merely replied ‘At home’, like a character out of W. W. Jacobs, but decided it would be over the borderline into unjustifiable rudeness, so gave his address.

‘I’ll be having a few people round for a beer one of these evenings,’ said the man, writing it down. ‘You must come. There are one or two men you know here. We’re doing our hospital training.’

‘I’m doing my hospital training, too,’ said Charles, but the other had hurried on. With a muttered exclamation of annoyance he wheeled the trolley forward again.

That day, in one of the private wards he attended, a new patient appeared: a thin, pallid, bird-like man in advanced middle-age, who spoke in a faint voice and lay back as if he were afraid and wanted to efface himself and make his bed look empty. Charles did his best to make a little cheering conversation as he swept out the room, and the bird-like man seemed grateful and responded at once.

‘You’d better put a special bit of elbow-grease on in number three,’ Rosa said to him at coffee-time. ‘There’s a man there it’d pay you to get in his good books.’

‘Why, who is he?’

‘You know Braceweight’s Chocolates? Well, that’s Mr. Brace­weight. They say he’s very rich. A proper millionaire they say he is!’ She glowed with suppressed excitement at the thought that a man who makes chocolate on a big scale can become rich, and can then fall ill, and that he should have come to ‘their’ hospital, and that Charles should be cleaning out the room where he lay in fear and suffering. It all thrilled her genuinely.