 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
revolutionists 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 the sudden recollection of
Mr. Vladimir, another of his associates, whom in virtue of subtle moral
affinities he was capable of judging correctly. He considered him as dangerous.
A shade of envy crept into his thoughts. Loafing was all very well for these
fellows, who knew not Mr. Vladimir, and had women to fall back upon; whereas he
had a woman to provide for -
    At this point, by a simple association of ideas, Mr. Verloc was brought face
to face with the necessity of going to bed some time or other that evening. Then
why not go now - at once? He sighed. The necessity was not so normally
pleasurable as it ought to have been for a man of his age and temperament. He
dreaded the demon of sleeplessness, which he felt had marked him for its own. He
raised his arm, and turned off the flaring gas-jet above his head.
    A bright band of light fell through the parlour door into the part of the
shop behind the counter. It enabled Mr. Verloc to ascertain at a glance the
number of silver coins in the till. These were but few; and for the first time
since he opened his shop he took a commercial survey of its value. This survey
was unfavourable. He had gone into trade for no commercial reasons. He had been
guided in the selection of this peculiar line of business by an instinctive
leaning towards shady transactions, where money is picked up easily. Moreover,
it did not take him out of his own sphere - the sphere which is watched by the
police. On the contrary, it gave him a publicly confessed standing in that
sphere, and
