“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.