He walked about the room in his stockinged feet, and his burly figure, with the hands worrying nervously at his throat, passed and repassed across the long strip of looking-glass in the door of his wife's wardrobe.

Then after slipping his braces off his shoulders he pulled up violently the venetian blind, and leaned his forehead against the cold window-pane--a fragile film of glass stretched between him and the enormity of cold, black, wet, muddy, inhospitable accumulation of bricks, slates, and stones, things in themselves unlovely and unfriendly to man.
Mr Verloc felt the latent unfriendliness of all out of doors with a force approaching to positive bodily anguish.

There is no occupation that fails a man more completely than that of a secret agent of police.

It's like your horse suddenly falling dead under you in the midst of an uninhabited and thirsty plain.

The comparison occurred to Mr Verloc because he had sat astride various army horses in his time, and had now the sensation of an incipient fall.