The people of Mr. Walpole’s novel are completely realized. They are as much alive as if they moved in the flesh before you. The reader may be baffled by them--many a reader will be, though to most readers they will be comprehensible before the closing chapters. But baffling or not, there is no disbelieving in them. Two of the most important--Alexei Petrovitch Semyonov and John Durward, the narrator--are characters in Mr. Walpole’s earlier novel, _The Dark Forest_. It is not absolutely necessary that before reading The Secret City you should read _The Dark Forest_, but it is much to be desired that you do so. Otherwise you will be unable to fathom Alexei Petrovitch (the overshadowing character) as adequately as you ought to from his first entrance. But about the others, the others besides the sinister Alexei Petrovitch. Take poor old Markovitch, for example. It’s not easy, of course, to see him as anything but a self-befooled, ridiculous figure until you grasp that he had three ideals to live up to. The first was his wife, Vera; then there were his hopeless inventions; lastly, there was Russia. Came a time when, as young Bohun, one of the Englishmen, put it: "He’d lost Russia, he was losing Vera, and he wasn’t very sure about his inventions." At the last he clung to Russia, hopefully. This revolution meant something wonderful for her--and for the whole world! Take Vera, beautiful and with immortal pride; with a great and candid courage, too. She had her sister, the girlish Nina, she had her husband. What was this tragedy of love that came to her and destroyed everything? Nina, tempestuous, lovable, like a child--why in the name of all that is merciful should _she_ have to suffer? Thank God! there was a happy ending here! Others--a half dozen or so--that we mustn’t speak of singly. Even such minor characters as Uncle Ivan and Baron Wilderling are etched perfectly. We would say a few words about the background. Mr. Walpole makes Petrograd as memorable a city as does Tolstoy his Moscow, with Napoleon gazing upon its rounded domes. And that is memorable indeed, as any one who ever read _War and Peace_ will certify. An intensely colorful city, lighted by stars and bonfires, exhaling the stink of the swamp and Rasputin’s corpse, coldly menaced by the frozen Neva River, a volcano of human destiny with its thick ice melting rapidly from the heat of terrible flames underneath. A city where a great slimy beast seems to appear apocalyptically from the sheeted waters of the canal. A city where always there stands silhouetted against the evening glow the immense figure of a black-bearded peasant, grave, controlled, thoughtful, watching. A city of dream--only the dream is true.