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he made no secret of the fact that he would try again to kill
himself as soon as he was released. The wards were crowd-
ed, and the house-surgeon was faced with a dilemma when
patients were brought in by the police: if they were sent on
to the station and died there disagreeable things were said
in the papers; and it was very difficult sometimes to tell if
a man was dying or drunk. Philip did not go to bed till he
was tired out, so that he should not have the bother of get-
ting up again in an hour; and he sat in the casualty ward
talking in the intervals of work with the night-nurse. She
was a gray-haired woman of masculine appearance, who
had been night-nurse in the casualty department for twenty
years. She liked the work because she was her own mistress
and had no sister to bother her. Her movements were slow,
but she was immensely capable and she never failed in an
emergency. The dressers, often inexperienced or nervous,
found her a tower of strength. She had seen thousands of
them, and they made no impression upon her: she always
called them Mr. Brown; and when they expostulated and
told her their real names, she merely nodded and went on
calling them Mr. Brown. It interested Philip to sit with her
in the bare room, with its two horse-hair couches and the
flaring gas, and listen to her. She had long ceased to look
upon the people who came in as human beings; they were
drunks, or broken arms, or cut throats. She took the vice
and misery and cruelty of the world as a matter of course;
she found nothing to praise or blame in human actions: she
accepted. She had a certain grim humour.
‘I remember one suicide,’ she said to Philip, ‘who threw

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