other cell.

It is a characteristic of all things now called "efficient", which means
mechanical and calculated, that if they go wrong at all they go entirely
wrong. There is no power of retrieving a defeat, as in simpler and more
living organisms. A strong gun can conquer a strong elephant, but a
wounded elephant can easily conquer a broken gun. Thus the Prussian
monarchy in the eighteenth century, or now, can make a strong army
merely by making the men afraid. But it does it with the permanent
possibility that the men may some day be more afraid of their enemies
than of their officers. Thus the drainage in our cities so long as it
is quite solid means a general safety, but if there is one leak it means
concentrated poison--an explosion of deathly germs like dynamite, a
spirit of stink. Thus, indeed, all that excellent machinery which is the
swiftest thing on earth in saving human labour is also the slowest
thing on earth in resisting human interference. It may be easier to
get chocolate for nothing out of a shopkeeper than out of an automatic
machine. But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automatic
machine would be much less likely to run after you.

Turnbull was not long in discovering this truth in connexion with the
cold and colossal machinery of this great asylum. He had been shaken
by many spiritual states since the instant when he was pitched head
foremost into that private cell which was to be his private room till
death. He had felt a high fit of pride and poetry, which had ebbed
away and left him deadly cold. He had known a period of mere scientific
curiosity, in the course of which he examined all the tiles of his cell,
with the gratifying conclusion that they were all the same shape and
size; but was greatly puzzled about the angle in the wall at the end,
and also about an iron peg or spike that stood out from the wall, the
object of which he does not know to this day. Then he had a period of
mere madness not to be written of by decent men, but only by those few
dirty novelists hallooed on by the infernal huntsman to hunt down and
humiliate human nature. This also passed, but left behind it a feverish
distaste for many of the mere objects around him. Long after he had
returned to sanity and such hopeless cheerfulness as a man might have on
a desert island, he disliked the regular squares of the pattern of wall
and floor and the triangle that terminated his corridor. Above all, he
had a hatred,