Page 433 - of-human-bondage-
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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
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