He picked out the Antigone, and chose the great chorus:—
Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν, Ἔρως, ὁς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις, . . .
Edwin read it in the level voice which the Head of St. Luke’s had always used for the recitation of Greek poetry. When he had finished the first strophe he looked up and saw that the Dean’s weak eyes, beneath their tortoiseshell spectacles, were brimming with tears.
“That will do,” he said, “unless you’d prefer to go on . . .”
“Yes . . . I don’t think you need translate it,” said the Dean. He paused for a moment, then, replacing the volume, went on. “In this university I am known as the Professor of Dead Languages. Dead languages. What?”
They passed a pleasant half-hour together. In Latin Edwin chose Lucretius and a passage from the Georgics, at the end of which the Dean confided to him that he kept bees. “Thank you, that will do,” he said. “I gather that you are entering the Medical School. . . . Well, it is a noble profession. I don’t know what we should do without doctors, I’m sure.”
Four days later Mr. Ingleby received him at the breakfast table with unconcealed emotion. “You’ve got your scholarship, Edwin. I’m . . . I’m as pleased as if I’d won it myself. I never had the opportunity of winning a scholarship in my life.” The hand in which he held the letter trembled. He kissed Edwin fervently. “This is a great day for me,” he said: and Edwin, glowing, felt that anything was worth while that could give such pleasure to the man that he had determined to love.
On a bright morning at the beginning of September Edwin found himself one of a crowd of ten or fifteen youths, waiting with a varying degree of assurance, outside the office of the Dean of the Medical Faculty in James Street, a sordid thoroughfare in which the pretentious buildings of the old College of Science hid its hinder quarters. The door was small, and only distinguished from its neighbours, a steam laundry and brassworker’s office, by a plate that bore the inscription, “University of North Bromwich. Medical School.” Inside the door stood a wooden box for a porter, usually empty, but in its moments of occupation surveying a long, dark cloakroom with a hundred or more numbered lockers and corresponding clothes-hooks, on a few of which undergraduates’ gowns and battered mortar-boards were hanging. This morning the Dean was holding audience of all the first year men, and each of the crowd in which Edwin now found himself a negligible unit, was waiting until his name should be called from the office, and, in the meantime, surveying his companions with suspicion and being surveyed with a more confident and collective suspicion by seniors who happened to drift through the corridors on business or idleness, and showed evidence of their initiation by familiarity with the porter.