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wards and partly because he had been to Oxford. Such of
the students as had been to a university kept a good deal to-
gether: they used a variety of means natural to the young in
order to impress upon the less fortunate a proper sense of
their inferiority; the rest of the students found their Olym-
pian serenity rather hard to bear. Griffiths was a tall fellow,
with a quantity of curly red hair and blue eyes, a white skin
and a very red mouth; he was one of those fortunate people
whom everybody liked, for he had high spirits and a con-
stant gaiety. He strummed a little on the piano and sang
comic songs with gusto; and evening after evening, while
Philip was reading in his solitary room, he heard the shouts
and the uproarious laughter of Griffiths’ friends above
him. He thought of those delightful evenings in Paris when
they would sit in the studio, Lawson and he, Flanagan and
Clutton, and talk of art and morals, the love-affairs of the
present, and the fame of the future. He felt sick at heart. He
found that it was easy to make a heroic gesture, but hard to
abide by its results. The worst of it was that the work seemed
to him very tedious. He had got out of the habit of being
asked questions by demonstrators. His attention wandered
at lectures. Anatomy was a dreary science, a mere matter of
learning by heart an enormous number of facts; dissection
bored him; he did not see the use of dissecting out labori-
ously nerves and arteries when with much less trouble you
could see in the diagrams of a book or in the specimens of
the pathological museum exactly where they were.
He made friends by chance, but not intimate friends,
for he seemed to have nothing in particular to say to his
Of Human Bondage