They were very dark from the preservative in which they had been kept, and the skin had almost the look of leather.
They were extremely emaciated.
The attendant took Philip up to one of the slabs.
A youth was standing by it.
"Is your name Carey?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Oh, then we've got this leg together.
It's lucky it's a man, isn't it?"
"Why?" asked Philip.
"They generally always like a male better," said the attendant. "A female's liable to have a lot of fat about her."
Philip looked at the body.
The arms and legs were so thin that there was no shape in them, and the ribs stood out so that the skin over them was tense.
A man of about forty-five with a thin, gray beard, and on his skull scanty, colourless hair: the eyes were closed and the lower jaw sunken.
Philip could not feel that this had ever been a man, and yet in the row of them there was something terrible and ghastly.
"I thought I'd start at two," said the young man who was dissecting with Philip.
"All right, I'll be here then."
He had bought the day before the case of instruments which was needful, and now he was given a locker.
He looked at the boy who had accompanied him into the dissecting-room and saw that he was white.
"Make you feel rotten?" Philip asked him.
"I've never seen anyone dead before."
They walked along the corridor till they came to the entrance of the school.
Philip remembered Fanny Price.
She was the first dead person he had ever seen, and he remembered how strangely it had affected him.
There was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.
There was something horrible about the dead, and you could imagine that they might cast an evil influence on the living.
"What d'you say to having something to eat?" said his new friend to Philip.
They went down into the basement, where there was a dark room fitted up as a restaurant, and here the students were able to get the same sort of fare as they might have at an aerated bread shop.
While they ate (Philip had a scone and butter and a cup of chocolate), he discovered that his companion was called Dunsford.
He was a fresh-complexioned lad, with pleasant blue eyes and curly, dark hair, large-limbed, slow of speech and movement.
He had just come from Clifton.
"Are you taking the Conjoint?" he asked Philip.
"Yes, I want to get qualified as soon as I can."
"I'm taking it too, but I shall take the F. R. C. S. afterwards.
I'm going in for surgery."
Most of the students took the curriculum of the Conjoint Board of the College of Surgeons and the College of Physicians; but the more ambitious or the more industrious added to this the longer studies which led to a degree from the University of London.
When Philip went to St. Luke's changes had recently been made in the regulations, and the course took five years instead of four as it had done for those who registered before the autumn of 1892.
Dunsford was well up in his plans and told Philip the usual course of events.
The "first conjoint" examination consisted of biology, anatomy, and chemistry; but it could be taken in sections, and most fellows took their biology three months after entering the school.
This science had been recently added to the list of subjects upon which the student was obliged to inform himself, but the amount of knowledge required was very small.
When Philip went back to the dissecting-room, he was a few minutes late, since he had forgotten to buy the loose sleeves which they wore to protect their shirts, and he found a number of men already working.
His partner had started on the minute and was busy dissecting out cutaneous nerves.
Two others were engaged on the second leg, and more were occupied with the arms.
"You don't mind my having started?"
"That's all right, fire away," said Philip.
He took the book, open at a diagram of the dissected part, and looked at what they had to find.
"You're rather a dab at this," said Philip.
"Oh, I've done a good deal of dissecting before, animals, you know, for the Pre Sci."
There was a certain amount of conversation over the dissecting-table, partly about the work, partly about the prospects of the football season, the demonstrators, and the lectures.
Philip felt himself a great deal older than the others.
They were raw schoolboys.