ral intonation not only utterly un-English, but absolutely
un-European, and startling even to Mr Verloc's experience of cosmopolitan
slums. "You dare! Well, I am going to speak plain English to you.
Voice won't do. We have no use for your voice. We don't want a voice.
We want facts--startling facts--damn you," he added, with a sort of
ferocious discretion, right into Mr Verloc's face.

"Don't you try to come over me with your Hyperborean manners," Mr Verloc
defended himself huskily, looking at the carpet. At this his
interlocutor, smiling mockingly above the bristling bow of his necktie,
switched the conversation into French.

"You give yourself for an 'agent provocateur.' The proper business of an
'agent provocateur' is to provoke. As far as I can judge from your
record kept here, you have done nothing to earn your money for the last
three years."

"Nothing!" exclaimed Verloc, stirring not a limb, and not raising his
eyes, but with the note of sincere feeling in his tone. "I have several
times prevented what might have been--"

"There is a proverb in this country which says prevention is better than
cure," interrupted Mr Vladimir, throwing himself into the arm-chair. "It
is stupid in a general way. There is no end to prevention. But it is
characteristic. They dislike finality in this country. Don't you be too
English. And in this particular instance, don't be absurd. The evil is
already here. We don't want prevention--we want cure."

He paused, turned to the desk, and turning over some papers lying there,
spoke in a changed business-like tone, without looking at Mr Verloc.

"You know, of course, of the International Conference assembled in
Milan?"

Mr Verloc intimated hoarsely that he was in the habit of reading the
daily papers. To a further question his answer was that, of course, he
understood what he read. At this Mr Vladimir, smiling faintly at the
documents he was still scanning one after another, murmured "As long as
it is not written in Latin, I suppose."

"Or Chinese," added Mr Verloc stolidly.

"H'm. Some of your revolutionary friends' effusions are written in a
_charabia_ every bit as incomprehensible as Chinese--" Mr Vladimir let
fall disdainfully a grey sheet of printed matter. "What are all these
leaflets headed F. P., with a hammer, pen, and torch crossed? What does
it mean, this F. P.?" Mr Verloc approached the imposing writing-table.

"The Future of the Proletariat. I