y, shot the bolt. He was not satisfied with his friends. In the
light of Mr Vladimir's philosophy of bomb throwing they appeared
hopelessly futile. The part of Mr Verloc in revolutionary politics
having been to observe, he could not all at once, either in his own home
or in larger assemblies, take the initiative of action. He had to be
cautious. Moved by the just indignation of a man well over forty,
menaced in what is dearest to him--his repose and his security--he asked
himself scornfully what else could have been expected from such a lot,
this Karl Yundt, this Michaelis--this Ossipon.

Pausing in his intention to turn off the gas burning in the middle of the
shop, Mr Verloc descended into the abyss of moral reflections. With the
insight of a kindred temperament he pronounced his verdict. A lazy
lot--this Karl Yundt, nursed by a blear-eyed old woman, a woman he had
years ago enticed away from a friend, and afterwards had tried more than
once to shake off into the gutter. Jolly lucky for Yundt that she had
persisted in coming up time after time, or else there would have been no
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 r