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 Mr 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 [delta] in the late Baron
Stott-Wartenheim's official, semi-official, and confidential
correspondence; the celebrated agent [delta], whose warnings had the
power to change the schemes and the dates of royal, imperial, grand ducal
journeys, and sometimes caused 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 naive,
but mostly at the expense of the universally regretted Baron
Stott-Wartenheim. His late Excellency, whom the august favour of his
Imperial master had imposed as Ambassador upon several reluctant
Ministers of Foreign Affairs, had enjoyed in his lifetime a fame for an
owlish, pessimistic gullibility. His Excellency had the social
revolution on the brain. He imagined himself to be a diplomatist set
apart by a special dispensation to watch the end of diplomacy, and pretty
nearly the end of the world, in a horrid democratic upheaval. His