 purity. Toodles was
revolutionary only in politics; his social beliefs and personal feelings he
wished to preserve unchanged through all the years allotted to him on this earth
which, upon the whole, he believed to be a nice place to live on.
    He stood aside.
    »Go in without knocking,« he said.
    Shades of green silk fitted low over all the lights imparted to the room
something of a forest's deep gloom. The haughty eyes were physically the great
man's weak point. This point was wrapped up in secrecy. When an opportunity
offered, he rested them conscientiously. The Assistant Commissioner entering saw
at first only a big pale hand supporting a big head, and concealing the upper
part of a big pale face. An open despatch-box stood on the writing-table near a
few oblong sheets of paper and a scattered handful of quill pens. There was
absolutely nothing else on the large flat surface except a little bronze
statuette draped in a toga, mysteriously watchful in its shadowy immobility. The
Assistant Commissioner, invited to take a chair, sat down. In the dim light, the
salient points of his personality, the long face, the black hair, his lankness,
made him look more foreign than ever.
    The great man manifested no surprise, no eagerness, no sentiment whatever.
The attitude in which he rested his menaced eyes was profoundly meditative. He
did not alter it the least bit. But his tone was not dreamy.
    »Well! What is it that you've found out already? You came upon something
unexpected on the first step.«
    »Not exactly unexpected, Sir Ethelred. What I mainly came upon was a
psychological state.«
    The Great Presence made a slight movement.
    »You must be lucid, please.«
    »Yes, Sir Ethelred. You know no doubt that most criminals at some time or
other feel an irresistible need of confessing - of making a clean breast of it
to somebody - to anybody. And they do it often to the police. In that Verloc
whom Heat wished so much to screen I've found a man in that particular
psychological state. The man, figuratively speaking, flung himself on my breast.
It was enough on my part to whisper to him who I was and to add I know that you
are at the bottom of this affair. It must have seemed miraculous to him that we
should know already, but he took it all in the stride. The wonderfulness of it
never checked him for a moment. There remained for me only to put to him the two
questions: Who
