- The chapter opens with a brief speech that someone seems to be giving on the nature of social change. The speaker insists that people's ideas have no bearing on the course of human history, and that the future is always determined by material things, like who's got cash and who doesn't. Basically, the speaker is talking straight Marxism, saying things like "History is dominated and determined by the tool and the production" (3.1).
- There is no point in worrying about changing the way people think, he adds. After all, it's inevitable that capitalism will soon fall and give way to socialism. (Remember that this was before Marxism even took off in countries like Russia or Cuba, so it was still a pretty untested idea at the time.)
- We find out that the person saying this stuff is named Michaelis, whom you might remember from Mr. Vladimir's little speech to Verloc in chapter two. Michaelis is known as a "ticket-of-leave apostle" because he's been let out of jail before his sentence was finished and because he has a very gentle and stoic way of predicting the future.
- The narrator is quick to add that Michaelis' voice "wheeze[s] as if deadened and oppressed by the layer of fat on his chest" (3.2). Apparently, Michaelis' fifteen years in jail have left him morbidly obese, possibly from eating so many non-nutritious food in his time on the inside. Since he's been let out of prison, Michaelis has met a rich old sugar mama who takes care of him.
- Next, we learn that Michaelis is speaking inside Mr. Verloc's home. Across from Michaelis, a gross old man named Karl Yundt laughs in a really evil, Disney-villain way.
- Yundt is really old and has a tough time moving around, and he holds onto a walking stick with a "skinny groping hand deformed by gouty swellings" (3.6). In other words, he's not exactly prom-date material.
- The dude waxes poetic on how he wishes he could find a group of radicals who were actually willing to kill to get what they want. But alas, he's never been able to find any political thinkers who'll actually do anything other than sit around and talk about their beliefs (kind of like himself, right?).
- The narrator goes on to describe the fourth member of the meeting (along with Michaelis, Yundt, and Verloc), who is a young ex-medical student and writer of political pamphlets named Comrade Ossipon.
- Michaelis goes on talking about his ideas, since being alone with his thoughts for so many years has made him completely deaf to the opinions of other people. (As if people had to go to prison for that to happen. Are we right, folks?)
- Verloc decides to get up for some fresh air. He opens the door to his kitchen and finds Stevie on the other side, bent over a table and concentrating very deeply on drawing a bunch of circles. Comrade Ossipon also gets up to have a look at Stevie; then he comes back into the room and notes his approval, calling Stevie "perfectly typical" (3.18).
- Verloc asks what Ossipon means by this, and Ossipon says that Stevie's drawings are very common for his type of "degeneracy" (3.20). It turns out that Ossipon believes really strongly in a bunch of ideas that are considered totally bogus nowadays. He believes in the teachings of a man named Cesare Lombroso, who wrote that you could spot a criminal just by looking at the shape of his skull.
- Even Ossipon's friends don't seem to think much of the supposedly "scientific" basis of a criminals physical characteristics. Karl Yundt, for one, tells it like it is and says, "Lombroso is an ass" (3.25). He goes on a huge tirade about how criminals are not born, but made by society, which marks them from a young age with a "branding instrument invented by the overfed to protect themselves against the hungry" (3.27). Ossipon tries to argue, but wilts when he looks at Yundt's gross face.
- By this point, Stevie has gotten up from the kitchen table, planning to take his drawings to bed. But he stands frozen in the doorway of the parlor, horrified at the terrible images that Karl Yundt uses to talk about the horror of social oppression.
- Again, the narrator shows us that Stevie is extremely sensitive to violence and injustice, since Stevie "[knows] very well that hot iron applied to ones skin hurt[s] very much. His scared eyes blaz[e] with indignation" (3.31).
- Eventually, the three anarchists get up and leave. Verloc slides the bolt behind them and curses, realizing that these men are all talk and that they'll never commit the violent act he needs them to.
- As he goes to bed, Verloc realizes that Stevie is still downstairs. When he goes back down, he finds Stevie walking around and mumbling in the kitchen. At this moment, he realizes that he, Winnie, Stevie, and their mother all rely on his money to survive. He has never had to think about this before because of the money he's made off the old spy game.
- He goes into his bedroom and wakes up Winnie by calling to her. She doesn't budge at first, but as soon as he mentions Stevie causing a nuisance downstairs, she flies out of bed to go deal with him.
- When she comes back, Verloc tells her he's not feeling well, and that he hasn't been feeling well for some time. Winnie, though, doesn't really pay attention to him and talks instead about how Stevie gets really upset when he hears men like Karl Yundt talking about how the rich people of the world live by "drinking the blood" of the poor.
- Stevie doesn't understand that these are metaphors, and his sympathy for human suffering makes him totally freak out when he hears people talk like Yundt.
- At the end of the chapter, Winnie says that she sometimes agrees with Stevie because she thinks that a lot of people are completely heartless and "don't deserve much mercy" (3.88). This shows that even though Winnie cares a lot about Stevie, she's definitely got some violent thoughts in her.
- All this time, Verloc just gets more depressed about the fact that Winnie really doesn't care about whether he feels good. She's only concerned with defending Stevie's place in the household. You might even feel bad for the guy at this point; but don't worry. It won't last long.