ts is associated
with a certain amount of affectionate contempt, which keeps it sweet, as
it were. By a benevolent provision of Nature no man is a hero to his
valet, or else the heroes would have to brush their own clothes.
Likewise no department appears perfectly wise to the intimacy of its
workers. A department does not know so much as some of its servants.
Being a dispassionate organism, it can never be perfectly informed. It
would not be good for its efficiency to know too much. Chief Inspector
Heat got out of the train in a state of thoughtfulness entirely untainted
with 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.