"How?"
"People are rather good to me; Fanny and Mrs. Marks, and Hulks. The machinery runs as though it were in an oil bath. Sometimes I feel an absolute slacker."
Christopher was silent for a while, lips compressed, eyes at gaze.
"If I became a G.P.," he said, "would you mind?"
"Immensely."
"Pater!"
He got off the window-sill and stood by Sorrell's chair, eagerly inarticulate.
"I'm twenty-seven. You have been responsible—I'm getting rather sick of hanging about, waiting. It may mean another two or three years, and when the chance comes it will only be a chance. Messing about with records and things—when I want to get at the real thing—and can't."
Sorrell watched the smoke from his pipe.
"It will come. The big chances are worth waiting for. I'm not worrying."
"Pater!" said the son, and stood mute.
His father held out a hand.
"You know me better than that. Things are pretty easy here now. As for the money, it has begun to roll in of itself. A trick money has—sometimes. If you have to wait five years for your chance it is all the same to me."
Kit stood silent in the dusk.
"Sometimes—I feel—like sucking your blood."
"My dear old chap, call it commercial transfusion. Do you think I regret it? I have never found life so good."
But Christopher was worried. It was a difficult period for a young man who had to stand by and watch other and older men doing the things he longed to do, and feeling the urge of those nine years of steady effort clamorous behind him. It was not that he lusted to use the knife. He wanted to try his skill and prove it, and yet he was no mere tool-man, a mender of watches. Always he remained aware of the mystery of the living tissues, of that marvellous and intricate nexus of arteries, nerves and muscles, that wonderful garment in which God has draped man's consciousness. Kit had a reverence for the human body, and when he saw it warped or diseased the soul of, his nascent skill yearned to lay hands upon it.
