because he had a correct
sentiment of the situation. Everything which he did not wish to pass had come to
pass. The future had become precarious. His judgment, perhaps, had been
momentarily obscured by his dread of Mr. Vladimir's truculent folly. A man
somewhat over forty may be excusably thrown into considerable disorder by the
prospect of losing his employment, especially if the man is a secret agent of
political police, dwelling secure in the consciousness of his high value and in
the esteem of high personages. He was excusable.
    Now the thing had ended in a crash. Mr. Verloc was cool; but he was not
cheerful. A secret agent who throws his secrecy to the winds from desire of
vengeance, and flaunts his achievements before the public eye, becomes the mark
for desperate and bloodthirsty indignations. Without unduly exaggerating the
danger, Mr. Verloc tried to bring it clearly before his wife's mind. He repeated
that he had no intention of letting the revolutionists do away with him.
    He looked straight into his wife's eyes. The enlarged pupils of the woman
received his stare into their unfathomable depths.
    »I am too fond of you for that,« he said, with a little nervous laugh.
    A faint flush coloured Mrs. Verloc's ghastly and motionless face. Having
done with the visions of the past, she had not only heard, but had also
understood the words uttered by her husband. By their extreme disaccord with her
mental condition these words produced on her a slightly suffocating effect. Mrs.
Verloc's mental condition had the merit of simplicity; but it was not sound. It
was governed too much by a fixed idea. Every nook and cranny of her brain was
filled with the thought that this man, with whom she had lived without distaste
for seven years, had taken the poor boy away from her in order to kill him - the
man to whom she had grown accustomed in body and mind; the man whom she had
trusted, took the boy away to kill him! In its form, in its substance, in its
effect, which was universal, altering even the aspect of inanimate things, it
was a thought to sit still and marvel at for ever and ever. Mrs. Verloc sat
still. And across that thought (not across the kitchen) the form of Mr. Verloc
went to and fro, familiarly in hat and overcoat, stamping with his boots upon
her brain. He was probably talking, too; but Mrs. Verloc's thought for the most
part covered the voice.
    Now and then,