"I am glad to tell you that Michaelis is altogether clear of this--" The patroness of the ex-convict received this assurance indignantly.
"Why?
Were your people stupid enough to connect him with--" "Not stupid," interrupted the Assistant Commissioner, contradicting deferentially.

"Clever enough--quite clever enough for that." A silence fell.

The man at the foot of the couch had stopped speaking to the lady, and looked on with a faint smile.
"I don't know whether you ever met before," said the great lady.
Mr Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner, introduced, acknowledged each other's existence with punctilious and guarded courtesy.
"He's been frightening me," declared suddenly the lady who sat by the side of Mr Vladimir, with an inclination of the head towards that gentleman.

The Assistant Commissioner knew the lady.
"You do not look frightened," he pronounced, after surveying her conscientiously with his tired and equable gaze.

He was thinking meantime to himself that in this house one met everybody sooner or later.
Mr Vladimir's rosy countenance was wreathed in smiles, because he was witty, but his eyes remained serious, like the eyes of convinced man.
"Well, he tried to at least," amended the lady.
"Force of habit perhaps," said the Assistant Commissioner, moved by an irresistible inspiration.
"He has been threatening society with all sorts of horrors," continued the lady, whose enunciation was caressing and slow, "apropos of this explosion in Greenwich Park.