It was not that he was afraid of her.

Mr Verloc imagined himself loved by that woman.

But she had not accustomed him to make confidences.

And the confidence he had to make was of a profound psychological order.

How with his want of practice could he tell her what he himself felt but vaguely: that there are conspiracies of fatal destiny, that a notion grows in a mind sometimes till it acquires an outward existence, an independent power of its own, and even a suggestive voice?
He could not inform her that a man may be haunted by a fat, witty, clean-shaved face till the wildest expedient to get rid of it appears a child of wisdom.
On this mental reference to a First Secretary of a great Embassy, Mr Verloc stopped in the doorway, and looking down into the kitchen with an angry face and clenched fists, addressed his wife.
"You don't know what a brute I had to deal with." He started off to make another perambulation of the table; then when he had come to the door again he stopped, glaring in from the height of two steps.
"A silly, jeering, dangerous brute, with no more sense than--After all these years! A man like me! And I have been playing my head at that game.