one now to help him out of the 'bus by the Green Park railings, where
that spectre took its constitutional crawl every fine morning. When that
indomitable snarling old witch died the swaggering spectre would have to
vanish too--there would be an end to fiery Karl Yundt. And Mr Verloc's
morality was offended also by the optimism of Michaelis, annexed by his
wealthy old lady, who had taken lately to sending him to a cottage she
had in the country. The ex-prisoner could moon about the shady lanes for
days together in a delicious and humanitarian idleness. As to Ossipon,
that beggar was sure to want for nothing as long as there were silly
girls with savings-bank books in the world. And Mr Verloc,
temperamentally identical with his associates, drew fine distinctions in
his mind on the strength of insignificant differences. He drew them with
a certain complacency, because the instinct of conventional
respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike
of all kinds of recognised labour--a temperamental defect which he shared
with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social
state. For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and
opportunities of that state, but against the price which must be paid for
the same in the coin of accepted morality, self-restraint, and toil. The
majority of revolutionises are the enemies of discipline and fatigue
mostly. There are natures too, to whose sense of justice the price
exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying,
humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The
remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother
of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers,
charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.

Lost for a whole minute in the abyss of meditation, Mr Verloc did not
reach the depth of these abstract considerations. Perhaps he was not
able. In any case he had not the time. He was pulled up painfully by