wns and smiles, the reflector of the
world's light. Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of
a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made
might as if indifferent to heaven's frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer
of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story,
depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any
setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.

Irresistibly the town became the background for the ensuing period of
deep and tentative meditations. Endless vistas opened before me in
various directions. It would take years to find the right way! It seemed
to take years!... Slowly the dawning conviction of Mrs. Verloc's
maternal passion grew up to a flame between me and that background,
tingeing it with its secret ardour and receiving from it in exchange
some of its own sombre colouring. At last the story of Winnie Verloc
stood out complete from the days of her childhood to the end,
unproportioned as yet, with everything still on the first plan, as it
were; but ready now to be dealt with. It was a matter of about three
days.

_This_ book is _that_ story, reduced to manageable proportions, its
whole course suggested and centred round the absurd cruelty of the
Greenwich Park explosion. I had there a task I will not say arduous but
of the most absorbing difficulty. But it had to be done. It was a
necessity. The figures grouped about Mrs. Verloc and related directly or
indirectly to her tragic suspicion that "life doesn't stand much looking
into," are the outcome of that very necessity. Personally I have never
had any doubt of the reality of Mrs. Verloc's story; but it had to be
disengaged from its obscurity in that immense town, it had to be made
credible, I don't mean so much as to her soul but as to her
surroundings, not so much as to her psychology but as to her humanity.
For the surroundings hints were not lacking. I had to fight hard to keep
at arms-length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over
London in my early days, lest they should rush in and overwhelm each
page of the story as these emerged one after another from a mood as
serious in feeling and thought as any in which I ever wrote a line. In
that respect I really think that "The Secret Agent" is a perfectly
genuine piece of work. Even the purely artistic purpose, that of
applying an ironic method to a subject of that kind, was formulated with
deliber