It may be that the collecting of French eighteenth-century paperweights does something to a man's nervous system, unfitting him for a life of crime by robbing him of the coolness and calm with the criminal classes find so essential in the exercise of their profession, but whether this is so or not, it is an undoubted fact that Wendell was completely lacking in the qualities that go to make a good crook. Where Henry had seemed unmoved by the dark deed they were undertaking and Kelly as plainly as nonchalant as a fish on ice, he had felt from the very inception of the scheme as if spiders to the number of several dozens were parading up and down his spinal cord.
(from The Purloined Paperweight, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
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