seems easy enough," she said. "I should think any one could write.
What do you do when it is done?"

"Oh, I go all over it and revise very carefully."

"Why, do you have to go all over it, after it is done?"

"Certainly."

"Then it takes you longer than it does most people, doesn't it?"

"I cannot say as to that. Everybody revises."

"Why, when I write a letter, if I go over it I always scratch out so
much that I have to do it over."

"That's the idea, exactly," I replied. "I go over it until there isn't
a thing to be scratched out, or a word to be changed."

"But you've got lots left," she said, enviously. "When I go over a
letter there's hardly anything left."

Innumerable questions followed these, but at last she had her
curiosity partially satisfied and turned away from me. I trust,
however, that I shall some day meet her again, for she too is "a
novelty!"

The mechanical part of a book is a source of great wonder to the
uninitiated. My galley proofs were once passed around among the guests
at a summer hotel as if they were some new strange animal. They did
not understand page proofs nor plates, nor how I could ever know when
it was right.

The cover is frequently commented upon as a thing of beauty (which
with my publishers it always is), and I am asked if I did it. I am
always sorry that I do not know enough to do covers, so I have to
explain that an artist does that--that I often do not see it until the
first copies come from the bindery, and that I am of such small
importance that I am not often consulted in relation to the
matter--being merely the poor worm who wrote the book.

There are many people who seem to be afraid to talk before me lest
their pearly utterances be transformed into copy. Time and time again
I have heard this: "We must be very careful what we say now, or Miss
---- will put us into a book!"

People are strangely literal. An author gets no credit whatever for
inventive faculty--his characters and stories are supposedly real
people and real things. I am asked how I came to know so much about
such and such a thing. I once wrote a love story with an unhappy
ending and it was at once assumed that I had been disappointed in
love!

When my first book came from the press I was pointed out at a
reception as the author of it. The man surveyed me long and carefully,
then he announced: "That's a mistake. That girl never wrote that book.
She's too frivolous and empty headed!"

I hav