The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale

by Joseph Conrad

Therefore Mrs Verloc formed the resolution to go at once and throw herself into the river off one of the bridges.

Ironically, Mrs. Verloc's first instinct, upon experiencing "perfect freedom," is to kill herself.

Women’s words fell into water, but the shortcomings of time-tables remained. The insular nature of Great Britain obtruded itself upon his notice in an odious form.

And, as often happens in the lament of poor humanity, rich in suffering but indigent in words, the truth—the very cry of truth—was found in a worn and artificial shape picked up somewhere among the phrases of sham sentiment.

The room was large, clean, respectable, and poor with that poverty suggesting the starvation of every human need except mere bread.