He
had had a very full day, and his nerves had been tried to the utmost.
After a month of maddening worry, ending in an unexpected catastrophe,
the storm-tossed spirit of Mr Verloc longed for repose. His career as a
secret agent had come to an end in a way no one could have foreseen;
only, now, perhaps he could manage to get a night's sleep at last. But
looking at his wife, he doubted it. She was taking it very hard--not at
all like herself, he thought. He made an effort to speak.

"You'll have to pull yourself together, my girl," he said
sympathetically. "What's done can't be undone."

Mrs Verloc gave a slight start, though not a muscle of her white face
moved in the least. Mr Verloc, who was not looking at her, continued
ponderously.

"You go to bed now. What you want is a good cry."

This opinion had nothing to recommend it but the general consent of
mankind. It is universally understood that, as if it were nothing more
substantial than vapour floating in the sky, every emotion of a woman is
bound to end in a shower. And it is very probable that had Stevie died
in his bed under her despairing gaze, in her protecting arms, Mrs
Verloc's grief would have found relief in a flood of bitter and pure
tears. Mrs Verloc, in common with other human beings, was provided with
a fund of unconscious resignation sufficient to meet the normal
manifestation of human destiny. Without "troubling her head about it,"
she was aware that it "did not stand looking into very much." But the
lamentable circumstances of Stevie's end, which to Mr Verloc's mind had
only an episodic character, as part of a greater disaster, dried her
tears at their very source. It was the effect of a white-hot iron drawn
across her eyes; at the same time her heart, hardened and chilled into a
lump of ice, kept her body in an inward shudder, set her features into a
frozen contemplative immobility addressed to a whitewashed wall with no
writing on it. The exigencies of Mrs Verloc's temperament, which, when
stripped of its philosophical reserve, was maternal and violent, forced
her to roll a series of thoughts in her motionless head. These thoughts
were rather imagined than expressed. Mrs Verloc was a woman of
singularly few words, either for public or private use. With the rage
and dismay of a betrayed woman, she reviewed the tenor of her life in
visions concerned mostly with Stevie's difficult existence from its
earliest days. It was a life of