social order cannot
be effectually shattered except by some form of collective or individual
violence was precise and correct. He was a moral agent - that was settled in his
mind. By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself
the appearances of power and personal prestige. That was undeniable to his
vengeful bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most
ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in
common with the rest of mankind - the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied
appetities, or perhaps of appeased conscience.
    Lost in the crowd, miserable and undersized, he meditated confidently on his
power, keeping his hand in the left pocket of his trousers, grasping lightly the
india-rubber ball, the supreme guarantee of his sinister freedom; but after a
while he became disagreeably affected by the sight of the roadway thronged with
vehicles and of the pavement crowded with men and women. He was in a long,
straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an immense multitude; but all
round him, on and on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous
piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed
numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force,
pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to
terror, too, perhaps.
    That was the form of doubt he feared most. Impervious to fear! Often while
walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of himself, he had such
moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of mankind. What if nothing could move
them? Such moments come to all men whose ambition aims at a direct grasp upon
humanity - to artists, politicians, thinkers, reformers, or saints. A despicable
emotional state this, against which solitude fortifies a superior character; and
with severe exultation the Professor thought of the refuge of his room, with its
padlocked cupboard, lost in a wilderness of poor houses, the hermitage of the
perfect anarchist. In order to reach sooner the point where he could take his
omnibus, he turned brusquely out of the populous street into a narrow and dusky
alley paved with flagstones. On one side the low brick houses had in their dusty
windows the sightless, moribund look of incurable decay - empty shells awaiting
demolition. From the other side life had not departed wholly as yet. Facing the
only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep
in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of
wardrobes