Outside the laboratory windows was a watery grey fog, and within a close warmth and the yellow light of the green-shaded gas lamps that stood two to each table down   
its narrow length. On each table stood a couple of glass jars containing the mangled vestiges of the crayfish, mussels, frogs, and guinea-pigs, upon which the students 
 
had been working, and down the side of the room, facing the windows, were shelves bearing bleached dissections in spirit, surmounted by a row of beautifully executed 
 
anatomical drawings in white wood frames and overhanging a row of cubical lockers. All the doors of the laboratory were panelled with blackboard, and on these were the 
 
half-erased diagrams of the previous day’s work. The laboratory was empty, save for the demonstrator, who sat near the preparation-room door, and silent, save for a 
 
low, continuous murmur, and the clicking of the rocker microtome at which he was working. But scattered about the room were traces of numerous students: hand-bags, 
 
polished boxes of instruments, in one place a large drawing covered by newspaper, and in another a prettily bound copy of “News from 217Nowhere,” a book oddly at 
 
variance with its surroundings. These things had been put down hastily as the students had arrived and hurried at once to secure their seats in the adjacent lecture-
 
theatre. Deadened by the closed door, the measured accents of the professor sounded as a featureless muttering.
Presently, faint through the closed windows came the sound of the Oratory clock striking the hour of eleven. The clicking of the microtome ceased, and the demonstrator 
 
looked at his watch, rose, thrust his hands into his pockets, and walked slowly down the laboratory towards the lecture-theatre door. He stood listening for a moment, 
 
and then his eye fell on the little volume by William Morris. He picked it up, glanced at the title, smiled, opened it, looked at the name on the fly-leaf, ran the 
 
leaves through with his hand, and put it down. Almost immediately the even murmur of the lecturer ceased, there was a sudden burst of pencils rattling on the desks in 
 
the lecture-theatre, a stirring, a scraping of feet, and a number of voices speaking together. Then a firm footfall approached the door, which began to open, and stood 
 
ajar, as some indistinctly heard question arrested the new-comer.
The demonstrator turned, walked slowly back past the microtome and left the laboratory by the preparation-room door. As he did so, first one, and then several students 
 
carrying note-books, 218entered the laboratory from the lecture-theatre, and distributed themselves among the little tables, or stood in a group about the doorway. 
 
They were an exceptionally heterogeneous assembly,—for while Oxford and Cambridge still recoil from the blushing prospect of mixed classes, the College of Science 
 
anticipated America in the matter years ago,—mixed socially, too, for the prestige of the College is high, and its scholarships, free of any age limit, dredge deeper 
 
even than do those of the Scotch universities. The class numbered one and twenty, but some remained in the theatre questioning the professor, copying the blackboard 
 
diagrams before they were washed off, or examining the special specimens he had produced to illustrate the day’s teaching. Of the nine who had come into the 
 
laboratory, three were girls, one of whom, a little fair woman wearing spectacles and dressed in greyish green, was peering out of the window at the fog, while the 
 
other two, both wholesome-looking, plain-faced school-girls, unrolled and put on the brown holland aprons they wore while dissecting. Of the men, two went down the 
 
laboratory and sat down in their places, one a pallid, dark-bearded man who had once been a tailor, the other a pleasant-featured, ruddy young man of twenty, dressed 
 
in a well-fitting brown suit, young Wedderburn, the son of Wedderburn the eye-specialist. The others formed a little knot near the theatre door. 219One of these, a 
 
dwarfed, spectacled figure with a hunch back, sat on a bent wood stool, two others, one a short, dark youngster, and the other a flaxen-haired, reddish-complexioned 
 
young man, stood leaning side by side against the slate sink, while the fourth stood facing them and maintained the larger share of the conversation.
This last person was named Hill. He was a sturdily built young fellow of the same age as Wedderburn, he had a white face, dark grey eyes, hair of an indeterminate 
 
colour, and prominent, irregular features. He talked rather louder than was needful, and thrust his hands deeply into his pockets. His collar was frayed and blue with 
 
the starch of a careless laundress, his clothes were evidently ready-made, and there was a patch on the side of his boot near the toe. And as he talked or listened to 
 
the others, he glanced now and again towards the lecture-theatre door. They were discussing the depressing peroration of the lecture they had just heard, the last 
 
lecture it was in the introductory course in Zo?logy. “From ovum to ovum is the goal of the higher vertebrata,” the lecturer had said in his melancholy tones, and so 
 
had neatly rounded off the sketch of comparative anatomy he had been developing. The spectacled hunchback had repeated it, with noisy appreciation, had tossed it 
 
towards the fair-haired student with an evident provocation, and had started one of those vague, rambling discussions 220on generalities so unaccountably dear to the 
 
student mind all the world over.
“That is our goal, perhaps,—I admit it,—as far as science goes,” said the fair-haired student, rising to the challenge. “But there are things above science.”
“Science,” said Hill, confidently, “is systematic knowledge. Ideas that don’t come into the system must anyhow—be loose ideas.” He was not quite sure whether 
 
that was a clever saying or a fatuity, until his hearers took it seriously.
“The thing I cannot understand,” said the hunchback, at large, “is whether Hill is a materialist or not.”
“There is one thing above matter,” said Hill, promptly, feeling he had a better thing this time, aware too of some one in the doorway behind him, and raising his 
 
voice a trifle for her benefit, “and that is—the delusion that there is something above matter.”
“So we have your gospel at last,” said the fair-haired student. “It’s all a delusion, is it? All our aspirations to lead something more than dogs’ lives, all our 
 
work for anything beyond ourselves. But see how inconsistent you are! Your socialism, for instance. Why do you trouble about the interests of the race? Why do you 
 
concern yourself about the beggar in the gutter? Why are you bothering yourself to lend that book”—he indicated William Morris by a 221movement of the head—“to 
 
every one in the lab?”
“Girl,” said the hunchback, indistinctly, and glanced guiltily over his shoulder.
The girl in brown, with the brown eyes, had come into the laboratory, and stood on the other side of the table behind him with her rolled-up apron in one hand, looking 
 
over her shoulder, listening to the discussion. She did not notice the hunchback, because she was glancing from Hill to his interlocutor. Hill’s consciousness of her 
 
presence betrayed itself to her only in his studious ignorance of the fact; but she understood that and it pleased her. “I see no reason,” said he, “why a man 
 
should live like a brute because he knows of nothing beyond matter, and does not expect to exist a hundred years hence.”
“Why shouldn’t he?” said the fair-haired student.
“Why should he?” said Hill.
“What inducement has he?”
“That’s the way with all you religious people. It’s all a business of inducements. Cannot a man seek after righteousness for righteousness’ sake?”
There was a pause. The fair man answered with a kind of vocal padding, “But—you see—inducement—when I said inducement—” to gain time. And then the hunchback came 
 
to his rescue and inserted a question. He was a terrible person in the debating society with his questions, 222and they invariably took one form,—a demand for a 
 
definition. “What’s your definition of righteousness?” said the hunchback, at this stage.
Hill experienced a sudden loss of complacency at this question, but even as it was asked, relief came in the person of Brooks, the laboratory attendant, who entered by 
 
the preparation-room door, carrying a number of freshly-killed guinea-pigs by their hind-legs. “This is the last batch of material this session,” said the youngster 
 
who had not previously spoken. Brooks advanced up the laboratory, smacking down a couple of guinea-pigs at each table, and the discussion perished abruptly as the 
 
students who were not already in their places hurried to them to secure the choice of a specimen. There was a noise of keys rattling on split rings as lockers were 
 
opened, and dissecting instruments taken out. Hill was already standing by his table, and his box of scalpels was sticking out of his pocket. The girl in brown came a 
 
step towards him, and leaning over his table, said softly, “Did you see that I returned your book, Mr. Hill?”
During the whole scene, she and the book had been vividly present in his consciousness, but he made a clumsy pretence of looking at the book and seeing it for the 
 
first time. “Oh, yes,” he said, taking it up. “I see. Did you like it?”
“I want to ask you some questions about it—sometime.”
223“Certainly,” said Hill. “I shall be glad.” He stopped awkwardly. “You liked it?” he said.
“It’s a wonderful book. Only some things I don’t understand.”
Then suddenly the laboratory was hushed by a curious braying noise. It was the demonstrator. He was at the blackboard ready to begin the day’s instruction, and it was 
 
his custom to demand silence by a sound midway between the “Er” of common intercourse, and the blast of a trumpet. The girl in brown slipped back to her place, it 
 
was immediately in front of Hill’s, and Hill, forgetting her forthwith, took a note-book out of the drawer of his table, turned over its leaves hastily, drew a stumpy 
 
pencil from his pocket, and prepared to make a copious note of the coming demonstration. For demonstrations and lectures are the sacred text of the College students. 
 
Books, saving only the professor’s own, you may—it is even expedient to—ignore.
Hill was the son of a Landport cobbler, and had been hooked by a chance blue paper the authorities had thrown out to the Landport Technical College. He kept himself in 
 
London on his allowance of a guinea a week, and found that with proper care this also covered his clothing allowance, an occasional waterproof collar, that is, and ink 
 
and needles and cotton and such-like necessaries for a man about town. This was his first year and his 224first session, but the brown old man in Landport had already 
 
got himself detested in many public-houses by boasting of his son “the professor.” Hill was a vigorous youngster, with a serene contempt for the clergy of all 
 
denominations, and a fine ambition to reconstruct the world. He regarded his scholarship as a brilliant opportunity. He had begun to read at seven, and had read 
 
steadily whatever came in his way, good or bad, since then. His worldly experience had been limited to the Island of Portsea, and acquired chiefly in the wholesale 
 
boot factory in which he had worked by day, after passing the seventh standard of the Board School. He had a considerable gift of speech, as the College Debating 
 
Society, which met amidst the crushing machines and mine models in the Metallurgical Theatre downstairs, already recognised, recognised by a violent battering of desks 
 
whenever he rose. And he was just at that fine emotional age when life opens at the end of a narrow pass, like a broad valley at one’s feet, full of the promise of 
 
wonderful discoveries and tremendous achievements. And his own limitations, save that he knew that he knew neither Latin or French, were all unknown to him.
At first his interest had been divided pretty equally between his biological work at the College and social and theological theorising, an employment which he took in 
 
deadly earnest. Of a night, when the big museum library was not open, he 225would sit on the bed of his room in Chelsea with his coat and a muffler on, and write out 
 
the lecture notes and revise his dissection memoranda until Thorpe called him out by a whistle,—the landlady objected to open the door to attic visitors,—and then 
 
the two would go prowling about the shadowy, shiny, gas-lit streets, talking, very much in the fashion of the sample just given, of the God Idea and Righteousness and 
 
Carlyle and the Reorganisation of Society. And in the midst of it all, Hill, arguing not only for Thorpe but for the casual passer-by, would lose the thread of his 
 
argument, glancing at some pretty, painted face that looked meaningly at him as he passed. Science and Righteousness! But once or twice lately there had been signs 
 
that a third interest was creeping into his life, and he had found his attention wandering from the fate of the mesoblastic somites or the probable meaning of the 
 
blastopore, to the thought of the girl with the brown eyes who sat at the table before him.
She was a paying student; she descended inconceivable social altitudes to speak to him. At the thought of the education she must have had and the accomplishments she 
 
must possess, the soul of Hill became abject within him. She had spoken to him first over a difficulty about the alisphenoid of a rabbit’s skull, and he had found 
 
that, in biology at least, he had no reason for self-abasement. And from that, after the manner of young 226people starting from any starting-point, they got to 
 
generalities, and while Hill attacked her upon the question of socialism,—some instinct told him to spare her a direct assault upon her religion,—she was gathering 
 
resolution to undertake what she told herself was his ?sthetic education. She was a year or two older than he, though the thought never occurred to him. The loan of “
 
News from Nowhere” was the beginning of a series of cross loans. Upon some absurd first principle of his, Hill had never “wasted time” upon poetry, and it seemed an 
 
appalling deficiency to her. One day in the lunch hour, when she chanced upon him alone in the little museum where the skeletons were arranged, shamefully eating the 
 
bun that constituted his midday meal, she retreated and returned, to lend him, with a slightly furtive air, a volume of Browning. He stood sideways towards her and 
 
took the book rather clumsily, because he was holding the bun in the other hand. And in the retrospect his voice lacked the cheerful clearness he could have wished.
That occurred after the examination in comparative anatomy, on the day before the College turned out its students and was carefully locked up by the officials, for the 
 
Christmas holidays. The excitement of cramming for the first trial of strength had for a little while dominated Hill to the exclusion of his other interests. In the 
 
forecasts of the 227result in which every one indulged, he was surprised to find that no one regarded him as a possible competitor for the Harvey Commemoration Medal, 
 
of which this and the two subsequent examinations disposed. It was about this time that Wedderburn, who so far had lived inconspicuously on the uttermost margin of 
 
Hill’s perceptions, began to take on the appearance of an obstacle. By a mutual agreement the nocturnal prowlings with Thorpe ceased for the three weeks before the 
 
examination, and his landlady pointed out that she really could not supply so much lamp-oil at the price. He walked to and fro from the College with little slips of 
 
mnemonics in his hand, lists of crayfish appendages, rabbits’ skull-bones, and vertebrate nerves, for example, and became a positive nuisance to foot-passengers in 
 
the opposite direction.
But by a natural reaction Poetry and the girl with the brown eyes ruled the Christmas holiday. The pending results of the examination became such a secondary 
 
consideration that Hill marvelled at his father’s excitement. Even had he wished it, there was no comparative anatomy to read in Landport, and he was too poor to buy 
 
books, but the stock of poets in the library was extensive and Hill’s attack was magnificently sustained. He saturated himself with the fluent numbers of Longfellow 
 
and Tennyson, and fortified himself with Shakespeare, found a kindred soul in Pope and a master in Shelley, and heard and fled the siren 228voices of Eliza Cook and 
 
Mrs. Hemans. But he read no more Browning, because he hoped for the loan of other volumes from Miss Haysman when he returned to London.
He walked from his lodgings to the College with that volume of Browning in his shiny black bag, and his mind teeming with the finest general propositions about poetry. 
 
Indeed he framed first this little speech and then that with which to grace the return. The morning was an exceptionally pleasant one for London, there was a clear, 
 
hard frost and undeniable blue in the sky, a thin haze softened every outline, and warm shafts of sunlight struck between the houseblocks and turned the sunny side of 
 
the street to amber and gold. In the hall of the College he pulled off his glove and signed his name with fingers so stiff with cold that the characteristic dash under 
 
the signature he cultivated became a quivering line. He imagined Miss Haysman about him everywhere. He turned at the staircase, and there, below, he saw a crowd 
 
struggling at the foot of the notice board. This, possibly, was the biology list. He forgot Browning and Miss Haysman for the moment, and joined the scrimmage. And at 
 
last with his cheek flattened against the sleeve of the man on the step above him, he read the list:
“Class I.
H. J. Somers Wedderburn.
William Hill.”
229And thereafter followed a second class that is outside our present sympathies. It was characteristic that he did not trouble to look for Thorpe on the Physics list, 
 
but backed out of the struggle at once, and in a curious emotional state between pride over common second-class humanity and acute disappointment at Wedderburn’s 
 
success, went on his way upstairs. At the top, as he was hanging up his coat in the passage, the zo?logical demonstrator, a young man from Oxford, who secretly 
 
regarded him as a blatant “mugger” of the very worst type, offered his heartiest congratulations.
At the laboratory door Hill stopped for a second to get his breath, and then entered. He looked straight up the laboratory and saw all five girl students grouped in 
 
their places, and Wedderburn, the once retiring Wedderburn, leaning rather gracefully against the window, playing with the blind tassel and talking, apparently, to the 
 
five of them. Now Hill could talk bravely enough and even overbearingly to one girl, and he could have made a speech to a roomful of girls, but this business of 
 
standing at ease and appreciating, fencing, and returning quick remarks round a group, was, he knew, altogether beyond him. Coming up the staircase his feelings for 
 
Wedderburn had been generous, a certain admiration perhaps, a willingness to shake his hand conspicuously and heartily as one who had fought but the first round. But 
 
before Christmas Wedderburn had never gone up 230to that end of the room to talk. In a flash Hill’s mist of vague excitement condensed abruptly to a vivid dislike of 
 
Wedderburn. Possibly his expression changed. As he came up to his place Wedderburn nodded carelessly to him, and the others glanced round. Miss Haysman looked at him 
 
and away again, the faintest touch of her eyes. “I can’t agree with you, Mr. Wedderburn,” she said.
“I must congratulate you on your first class, Mr. Hill,” said the spectacled girl in green, turning round and beaming at him.
“It’s nothing,” said Hill, staring at Wedderburn and Miss Haysman talking together, and eager to hear what they talked about.
“We poor folks in the second class don’t think so,” said the girl in spectacles.
What was it Wedderburn was saying? Something about William Morris! Hill did not answer the girl in spectacles, and the smile died out of his face. He could not hear 
 
and failed to see how he could “cut in.” Confound Wedderburn! He sat down, opened his bag, hesitated whether to return the volume of Browning forthwith, in the sight 
 
of all, and instead drew out his new note-books for the short course in elementary botany that was now beginning, and which would terminate in February. As he did so a 
 
fat heavy man with a white face and pale grey eye............