should say that he held in contempt any facility that he may
have had. It was owing to his incomparable energy and Joblike
patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all. Every
phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could
think of, the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive.
Phrases, paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written
over and over again. He worked upon a principle of
elimination. If he wished to describe an automobile turning
in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description
from which there was omitted no detail which the most
observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with
reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a
process of omitting one by one those details which he had been
at such pains to recall; and after each omission he would ask
himself: "Does the picture remain?" If it did not, he
restored the detail which he had just omitted, and
experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and
so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the
reader one of those, swiftly flashed, ice-clear pictures
(complete in every detail) with which his tales and romances
are so delightfully and continuously adorned.

But it is quarter to eleven, and, this being a time of
holiday, R. H. D. emerges from his workroom happy to think
that he has placed one hundred and seven words between himself
and the wolf who hangs about every writer's door. He isn't
satisfied with those hundred and seven words. He never was in
the least satisfied with anything that he wrote, but he has
searched his mind and his conscience and he believes that
under the circumstances they are the very best that he can do.