His consciousness centred itself for a moment upon his right hand, and he held it out and examined it as though it were the hand of a stranger. Kit's hands were very like his father's, but the fingers were stronger, and not recurved at the tips. Sorrell's hands had had to clutch at his chances and hold on to them; his son's fingers were straighter and more creative. Kit's hands combined sensitiveness and strength; they were dexterous, capable of fine and precise movements, yet very steady. They were to be a surgeon's hands, and for the best part of two years Kit had had the training of them ever-present in his mind, and in the physiology lab and the dissecting-room he had gained a nice skill with forceps and scalpel. Dissecting was an art, laying bare the delicate tissue until you had made a picture, and Kit had perfected this skill. The Demonstrators of Anatomy had used his dissections for the benefit of other students. Poor Pentreath, eager and too much in a hurry, and never quite able to overcome a loathing of the pickled carcases, was always floundering, or niggling away with an uncertain scalpel.
Kit smiled at his own right hand. You had to have something behind the hand, and he felt that he had.
He remembered an afternoon at Roland's house when Cherry had told his hand, turning it over and over, and prodding it with the soft tip of a beautifully manicured finger, while Roland had quizzed them both.
"You are going to do things with your hands," she had said to Kit.
He remembered his smiling—"I mean to."
No, he did not feel arrogant about it, or full of a facile cocksureness, but he knew what he wanted to do, and how to set about the doing of it, and he had won his first battles.
"The old pater will be pleased."
Appreciation matters, and his father's understanding keenness was no small part of Kit's inspiration.
And while the son was hanging over the mill-pool and looking at the green willows, the father was ringing up Mr. Porteous on the telephone.
"Hallo,—that you? Kit's got a first. What? You were sure he would?—Well,—so was I—in a way, but then—there is nothing like a certainty. Proud? I am—not a
