pery, pestilential old man in
petticoats. And it was as of a woman that he thought of her--the
specially choice incarnation of the feminine, wherein is recruited the
tender, ingenuous, and fierce bodyguard for all sorts of men who talk
under the influence of an emotion, true or fraudulent; for preachers,
seers, prophets, or reformers.

Appreciating the distinguished and good friend of his wife, and himself,
in that way, the Assistant Commissioner became alarmed at the convict
Michaelis' possible fate. Once arrested on suspicion of being in some
way, however remote, a party to this outrage, the man could hardly escape
being sent back to finish his sentence at least. And that would kill
him; he would never come out alive. The Assistant Commissioner made a
reflection extremely unbecoming his official position without being
really creditable to his humanity.

"If the fellow is laid hold of again," he thought, "she will never
forgive me."

The frankness of such a secretly outspoken thought could not go without
some derisive self-criticism. No man engaged in a work he does not like
can preserve many saving illusions about himself. The distaste, the
absence of glamour, extend from the occupation to the personality. It is
only when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the
particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the comfort
of complete self-deception. The Assistant Commissioner did not like his
work at home. The police work he had been engaged on in a distant part
of the globe had the saving character of an irregular sort of warfare or
at least the risk and excitement of open-air sport. His real abilities,
which were mainly of an administrative order, were combined with an
adventurous disposition. Chained to a desk in the thick of four millions
of men, he considered himself the victim of an ironic fate--the same, no
doubt, which had brought about his marriage with a woman exceptionally
sensitive in the matter of colonial climate, besides other limitations
testifying to the delicacy of her nature--and her tastes. Though he
judged his alarm sardonically he did not dismiss the improper thought
from his mind. The instinct of self-preservation was strong within him.
On the contrary, he repeated it mentally with profane emphasis and a
fuller precision: "Damn it! If that infernal Heat has his way the
fellow'll die in prison smothered in his fat, and she'll never forgive
me."