Born of industrious parents for a life of toil, he had embraced indolence from an impulse as profound as inexplicable and as imperious as the impulse which directs a man's preference for one particular woman in a given thousand.

He was too lazy even for a mere demagogue, for a workman orator, for a leader of labour.
It was too much trouble.

He required a more perfect form of ease; or it might have been that he was the victim of a philosophical unbelief in the effectiveness of every human effort.

Such a form of indolence requires, implies, a certain amount of intelligence.

Mr Verloc was not devoid of intelligence--and at the notion of a menaced social order he would perhaps have winked to himself if there had not been an effort to make in that sign of scepticism.