y. "Moreover, it's no
concern of yours."

"Oh yes, it is," snapped Mr Vladimir. "I am beginning to be convinced
that you are not at all the man for the work you've been employed on.
Why, you must have discredited yourself completely in your own world by
your marriage. Couldn't you have managed without? This is your virtuous
attachment--eh? What with one sort of attachment and another you are
doing away with your usefulness."

Mr Verloc, puffing out his cheeks, let the air escape violently, and that
was all. He had armed himself with patience. It was not to be tried
much longer. The First Secretary became suddenly very curt, detached,
final.

"You may go now," he said. "A dynamite outrage must be provoked. I give
you a month. The sittings of the Conference are suspended. Before it
reassembles again something must have happened here, or your connection
with us ceases."

He changed the note once more with an unprincipled versatility.

"Think over my philosophy, Mr--Mr--Verloc," he said, with a sort of
chaffing condescension, waving his hand towards the door. "Go for the
first meridian. You don't know the middle classes as well as I do.
Their sensibilities are jaded. The first meridian. Nothing better, and
nothing easier, I should think."

He had got up, and with his thin sensitive lips twitching humorously,
watched in the glass over the mantelpiece Mr Verloc backing out of the
room heavily, hat and stick in hand. The door closed.

The footman in trousers, appearing suddenly in the corridor, let Mr
Verloc another way out and through a small door in the corner of the
courtyard. The porter standing at the gate ignored his exit completely;
and Mr Verloc retraced the path of his morning's pilgrimage as if in a
dream--an angry dream. This detachment from the material world was so
complete that, though the mortal envelope of Mr Verloc had not hastened
unduly along the streets, that part of him to which it would be
unwarrantably rude to refuse immortality, found itself at the shop door
all at once, as if borne from west to east on the wings of a great wind.
He walked straight behind the counter, and sat down on a wooden chair
that stood there. No one appeared to disturb his solitude. Stevie, put
into a green baize apron, was now sweeping and dusting upstairs, intent
and conscientious, as though he were playing at it; and Mrs Verloc,
warned in the kitchen by the clatter of the cracked bell, had merely c