of the Proletariat. It's a society,« he explained, standing
ponderously by the side of the armchair, »not anarchist in principle, but open
to all shades of revolutionary opinion.«
    »Are you in it?«
    »One of the Vice-Presidents,« Mr. Verloc breathed out heavily; and the First
Secretary of the Embassy raised his head to look at him.
    »Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself,« he said, incisively. »Isn't your
society capable of anything else but printing this prophetic bosh in blunt type
on this filthy paper - eh? Why don't you do something? Look here. I've this
matter in hand now, and I tell you plainly that you will have to earn your
money. The good old Stott-Wartenheim times are over. No work, no pay.«
    Mr. Verloc felt a queer sensation of faintness in his stout legs. He stepped
back one pace, and blew his nose loudly.
    He was, in truth, startled and alarmed. The rusty London sunshine struggling
clear of the London mist shed a lukewarm brightness into the First Secretary's
private room: and in the silence Mr. Verloc heard against a window-pane the
faint buzzing of a fly - his first fly of the year - heralding better than any
number of swallows the approach of spring. The useless fussing of that tiny,
energetic organism affected unpleasantly this big man threatened in his
indolence.
    In the pause Vladimir formulated in his mind a series of disparaging remarks
concerning Mr. Verloc's face and figure. The fellow was unexpectedly vulgar,
heavy, and impudently unintelligent. He looked uncommonly like a master plumber
come to present his bill. The First Secretary of the Embassy, from his
occasional excursions into the field of American humour, had formed a special
notion of that class of mechanic as the embodiment of fraudulent laziness and
incompetency.
    This was then the famous and trusty secret agent, so secret that he was
never designated otherwise but by the symbol D. in the late Baron
Stott-Wartenheim's official, semi-official, and confidential correspondence; the
celebrated agent D. whose warnings had the power to change the schemes and the
dates of royal, imperial, grand-ducal journeys, and sometimes cause them to be
put off altogether! This fellow! And Mr. Vladimir indulged mentally in an
enormous and derisive fit of merriment, partly at his own astonishment, which he
judged naïve, but mostly at the expense of the universally regretted Baron
Stott-Wartenheim. His late Excellency, whom the