Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/254

 A practical woman who has her living to earn and a house to consider, and two very responsible women as clients on the first and second floors, desires to avoid complications. Young men with latch-keys! Mrs. Gibbins relaxed some of her inevitable hostility.

Each morning at 8.45 Kit plunged into his London. He walked up Guildford Street, half circled Russell Square, and proceeding across Tottenham Court Road, made his way down one of the shaggy streets leading towards the hospital. It was in Russell Square that he struck the flurry of London, the haste of young women and girls and men of all ages and sizes whom the suburbs poured into offices and shops and restaurants. Kit's course lay mostly across the track of these hurrying clerks and shop-girls, but sometimes he went a little way with the crowd. The femininity of it poured round him, those little bobbing hats, the slim legs swinging under those provoking skirts, those London faces pretty or plain, soft or hard, like pale flowers drifting. Sometimes at the same corner he would pass the same girl, or the same group of girls, silent or chattering, always hurrying. Sometimes a girl looked at him, and the look was neither hostile nor friendly.

Kit made a habit of walking very fast, as though he were vaguely conscious of something soft and impeding brushing against the impetus of his youth, and as though the impetus itself had a necessary virtue. His purpose propelled him out of the house in Brunswick Square, and past those tripping feet and little bobbing hats, to the grey forecourt of St. Martha's Hospital. He hung up his hat and coat in the cloak-room, picked up one of the other Cambridge men who had come to St. Martha's, sat through a lecture, dissected, or squinted down a microscope, read a book or talked or ragged for five minutes, and went out to lunch at "Lyons" in Oxford Street. He would spend some of his afternoons in the out-patient departments; he carried a stethoscope; for he had so thorough a knowledge of his anatomy and physiology that he could spare the time for clinical work. The second part of the Cambridge M.B. was to be taken in December and beyond it the first part of the Fellowship challenged his ambition. At half-past four he allowed himself a round of buttered toast and a cup of tea, and after that he would, walk, turning into