his wife entered and
put them in his pocket.
    »Mrs. Rendal's been at me again, Bob,« Pennyloaf said, as she set down her
market-basket. »You'll have to give her something to-day.«
    He paid no attention, and Pennyloaf had a difficulty in bringing him to
discuss the subject of the landlady's demands. Ultimately, however, he admitted
with discontent the advisability of letting Mrs. Rendal have something on
account. Though it was Saturday night, he let hour after hour go by and showed
no disposition to leave home; to Pennyloaf's surprise, he sat almost without
moving by the fire, absorbed in thought.
    Genuine respect for law is the result of possessing something which the law
exerts itself to guard. Should it happen that you possess nothing, and that your
education in metaphysics has been grievously neglected, the strong probability
is, that your mind will reduce the principle of society to its naked formula:
Get, by whatever means, so long as with impunity. On that formula Bob Hewett was
brooding; in the hours of this Saturday evening he exerted his mind more
strenuously than ever before in the course of his life. And to a foregone
result. Here is a man with no moral convictions, with no conscious relations to
society save those which are hostile, with no personal affections; at the same
time, vaguely aware of certain faculties in himself for which life affords no
scope and encouraged in various kinds of conceit by the crass stupidity of all
with whom he associates. It is suggested to him all at once that there is a very
easy way of improving his circumstances, and that by exercise of a certain craft
with which he is perfectly familiar; only, the method happens to be criminal.
»Men who do this kind of thing are constantly being caught and severely
punished. Yes; men of a certain kind; not Robert Hewett. Robert Hewett is
altogether an exceptional being; he is head and shoulders above the men with
whom he mixes; he is clever, he is remarkably good-looking. If anyone in this
world, of a truth Robert Hewett may reckon on impunity when he sets his wits
against the law. Why, his arrest and punishment is an altogether inconceivable
thing; he never in his life had a charge brought against him.«
    Again and again it came back to that. Every novice in unimpassioned crime
has that thought, and the more self-conscious the man, the more impressed with a
sense of his own importance, so much the weightier is its effect with