disloyalty, but not quite free of that jealous mistrust which so often
springs on the ground of perfect devotion, whether to women or to
institutions.

It was in this mental disposition, physically very empty, but still
nauseated by what he had seen, that he had come upon the Professor. Under
these conditions which make for irascibility in a sound, normal man, this
meeting was specially unwelcome to Chief Inspector Heat. He had not been
thinking of the Professor; he had not been thinking of any individual
anarchist at all. The complexion of that case had somehow forced upon
him the general idea of the absurdity of things human, which in the
abstract is sufficiently annoying to an unphilosophical temperament, and
in concrete instances becomes exasperating beyond endurance. At the
beginning of his career Chief Inspector Heat had been concerned with the
more energetic forms of thieving. He had gained his spurs in that
sphere, and naturally enough had kept for it, after his promotion to
another department, a feeling not very far removed from affection.
Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry,
perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world;
it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in
coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose
practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the
nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or
fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own
special phraseology as "Seven years hard." Chief Inspector Heat was, of
course, not insensible to the gravity of moral differences. But neither
were the thieves he had been looking after. They submitted to the severe
sanctions of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat with a certain
resignation.