Quotation from: The Secret Agent

Written by: Joseph Conrad


That made the groundless fame of his condemnation; the fame of his
release was made for him on no better grounds by people who wished to
exploit the sentimental aspect of his imprisonment either for purposes of
their own or for no intelligible purpose. He let them do so in the
innocence of his heart and the simplicity of his mind. Nothing that
happened to him individually had any importance. He was like those
saintly men whose personality is lost in the contemplation of their
faith. His ideas were not in the nature of convictions. They were
inaccessible to reasoning. They formed in all their contradictions and
obscurities an invincible and humanitarian creed, which he confessed
rather than preached, with an obstinate gentleness, a smile of pacific
assurance on his lips, and his candid blue eyes cast down because the
sight of faces troubled his inspiration developed in solitude. In that
characteristic attitude, pathetic in his grotesque and incurable obesity
which he had to drag like a galley slave's bullet to the end of his days,
the Assistant Commissioner of Police beheld the ticket-of-leave apostle
filling a privileged arm-chair within the screen. He sat there by the
head of the old lady's couch, mild-voiced and quiet, with no more self-
consciousness than a very small child, and with something of a child's
charm--the appealing charm of trustfulness. Confident of the future,
whose secret ways had been revealed to him within the four walls of a
well-known penitentiary, he had no reason to look with suspicion upon
anybody. If he could not give the great and curious lady a very definite
idea as to what the world was coming to, he had managed without effort to
impress her by his unembittered faith, by the sterling quality of his
optimism.

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