"Are you, or are you not, a police detective ?" "No!" answered Syme, like a man standing on the hangman's drop.
"You swear it," said the old man, leaning across to him, his dead face becoming as it were loathsomely alive.

"You swear it! You swear it! If you swear falsely, will you be damned?
Will you be sure that the devil dances at your funeral?
Will you see that the nightmare sits on your grave?
Will there really be no mistake?
You are an anarchist, you are a dynamiter! Above all, you are not in any sense a detective?
You are not in the British police ?" He leant his angular elbow far across the table, and put up his large loose hand like a flap to his ear.
"I am not in the British police," said Syme with insane calm.
Professor de Worms fell back in his chair with a curious air of kindly collapse.
"That's a pity," he said, "because I am." Syme sprang up straight, sending back the bench behind him with a crash.
"Because you are what ?" he said thickly.

"You are what ?" "I am a policeman," said the Professor with his first broad smile, and beaming through his spectacles.

"But as you think policeman only a relative term, of course I have nothing to do with you.

I am in the British police force; but as you tell me you are not in the British police force, I can only say that I met you in a dynamiters' club.