stopped speaking to
the lady, and looked on with a faint smile.

"I don't know whether you ever met before," said the great lady.

Mr Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner, introduced, acknowledged each
other's existence with punctilious and guarded courtesy.

"He's been frightening me," declared suddenly the lady who sat by the
side of Mr Vladimir, with an inclination of the head towards that
gentleman. The Assistant Commissioner knew the lady.

"You do not look frightened," he pronounced, after surveying her
conscientiously with his tired and equable gaze. He was thinking
meantime to himself that in this house one met everybody sooner or later.
Mr Vladimir's rosy countenance was wreathed in smiles, because he was
witty, but his eyes remained serious, like the eyes of convinced man.

"Well, he tried to at least," amended the lady.

"Force of habit perhaps," said the Assistant Commissioner, moved by an
irresistible inspiration.

"He has been threatening society with all sorts of horrors," continued
the lady, whose enunciation was caressing and slow, "apropos of this
explosion in Greenwich Park. It appears we all ought to quake in our
shoes at what's coming if those people are not suppressed all over the
world. I had no idea this was such a grave affair."

Mr Vladimir, affecting not to listen, leaned towards the couch, talking
amiably in subdued tones, but he heard the Assistant Commissioner say:

"I've no doubt that Mr Vladimir has a very precise notion of the true
importance of this affair."

Mr Vladimir asked himself what that confounded and intrusive policeman
was driving at. Descended from generations victimised by the instruments
of an arbitrary power, he was racially, nationally, and individually
afraid of the police. It was an inherited weakness, altogether
independent of his judgment, of his reason, of his experience. He was
born to it. But that sentiment, which resembled the irrational horror
some people have of cats, did not stand in the way of his immense
contempt for the English police. He finished the sentence addressed to
the great lady, and turned slightly in his chair.

"You mean that we have a great experience of these people. Yes; indeed,
we suffer greatly from their activity, while you"--Mr Vladimir hesitated
for a moment, in smiling perplexity--"while you suffer their presence
gladly in your midst," he finished, displaying a dimple on each
clean-shaven cheek. Then he added mo