the subconscious conviction that the framework of an
established social order cannot be effectually shattered except by some
form of collective or individual violence was precise and correct. He
was a moral agent--that was settled in his mind. By exercising his
agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearances of
power and personal prestige. That was undeniable to his vengeful
bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most ardent
of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in
common with the rest of mankind--the peace of soothed vanity, of
satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience.

Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated confidently on
his power, keeping his hand in the left pocket of his trousers, grasping
lightly the india-rubber ball, the supreme guarantee of his sinister
freedom; but after a while he became disagreeably affected by the sight
of the roadway thronged with vehicles and of the pavement crowded with
men and women. He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere
fraction of an immense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to
the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt
the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like
locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing
on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to
terror too perhaps.

That was the form of doubt he feared most. Impervious to fear! Often
while walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of himself, he
had such moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of mankind. What if
nothing could move them? Such moments come to all men whose ambition
aims at a direct grasp upon humanity--to artists, politicians, thinkers,
reformers, or saints. A despicable emotional state this, against which
solitude fortifies a superior character; and with severe exultation the
Professor thought of the refuge of his room, with its padlocked cupboard,
lost in a wilderness of poor houses, the hermitage of the perfect
anarchist. In order to reach sooner the point where he could take his
omnibus, he turned brusquely out of the populous street into a narrow and
dusky alley paved with flagstones. On one side the low brick houses had
in their dusty windows the sightless, moribund look of incurable
decay--empty shells awaiting demolition. From the other side