roduced a dull
effect of rustiness. But Mr Verloc was not in the least conscious of
having got rusty. He surveyed through the park railings the evidences of
the town's opulence and luxury with an approving eye. All these people
had to be protected. Protection is the first necessity of opulence and
luxury. They had to be protected; and their horses, carriages, houses,
servants had to be protected; and the source of their wealth had to be
protected in the heart of the city and the heart of the country; the
whole social order favourable to their hygienic idleness had to be
protected against the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labour. It had
to--and Mr Verloc would have rubbed his hands with satisfaction had he
not been constitutionally averse from every superfluous exertion. His
idleness was not hygienic, but it suited him very well. He was in a
manner devoted to it with a sort of inert fanaticism, or perhaps rather
with a fanatical inertness. Born of industrious parents for a life of
toil, he had embraced indolence from an impulse as profound as
inexplicable and as imperious as the impulse which directs a man's
preference for one particular woman in a given thousand. He was too lazy
even for a mere demagogue, for a workman orator, for a leader of labour.
It was too much trouble. He required a more perfect form of ease; or it
might have been that he was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the
effectiveness of every human effort. Such a form of indolence requires,
implies, a certain amount of intelligence. Mr Verloc was not devoid of
intelligence--and at the notion of a menaced social order he would
perhaps have winked to himself if there had not been an effort to make in
that sign of scepticism. His big, prominent eyes were not well adapted
to winking. They were rather of the sort that closes solemnly in slumber
with majestic effect.

Undemonstrative and burly in a fat-pig style, Mr Verloc, without either
rubbing his hands with satisfaction or winking sceptically at his
thoughts, proceeded on his way. He trod the pavement heavily with his
shiny boots, and his general get-up was that of a well-to-do mechanic in
business for himself. He might have been anything from a picture-frame
maker to a lock-smith; an employer of labour in a small way. But there
was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have
acquired in the practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised:
the air