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. They were his fellow-citizens gone wrong because of
imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that
difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of
fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind
and the instincts of a police officer. Both recognize the same conventions, and
have a working knowledge of each other's methods and of the routine of their
respective trades. They understand each other, which is advantageous to both,
and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of the same
machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine
for granted in different ways, but with a seriousness essentially the same