my hands.

As for my characters: you ask how I conceive them. Once the plot is
rescued from the misty depths of the mind, the characters come and
range themselves readily enough. A scene, we will say, suggests
itself--a garden, a flower-show, a ball-room, what you will--and two
people in it. A young man and woman for choice. They are always young
with me, for that matter, for what under the heaven we are promised is
so altogether perfect as youth! Oh, that we could all be young for ever
and for ever; that Time,

'That treads more soft than e'er did midnight thief',

could be abruptly slain by some great conqueror, and we poor human
beings let loose, defiant of its thralls! But no such conqueror comes,
and Time flies swiftly as of yore, and drags us headlong, whether we
will or not, to the unattractive grave.

If any one of you, dear readers, is as bad a sleeper as I am, you will
understand how thoughts swarm at midnight. Busy, bustling, stinging
bees, they forbid the needed rest, and, thronging the idle brain,
compel attention. Here in the silent hours the ghosts called characters
walk slowly, smiling, bowing, nodding, pirouetting, going like
marionettes through all their paces. At night, I have had my gayest
thoughts; at night, my saddest. All things seem open then to that
giant, Imagination.

Here, lying in the dark, with as yet no glimmer of the coming dawn, no
faintest light to show where the closed curtains join, too indolent to
rise and light the lamp, too sleepy to put one's foot out of the
well-warmed bed, praying fruitlessly for that sleep that will not
come--it is at such moments as these that my mind lays hold of the
novel now in hand, and works away at it with a vigour, against which
the natural desire for sleep hopelessly makes battle.

Just born this novel may be, or half completed; however it is, off goes
one's brain at a tangent. Scene follows scene, one touching the other;
the characters unconsciously fall into shape; the villain takes a ruddy
hue; the hero dons a white robe; as for the heroine, who shall say what
dyes from Olympia are not hers? A conversation suggests itself, an act
thrusts itself into notice. Lightest of skeletons all these must
necessarily be, yet they make up eventually the big whole, and from the
brain wanderings of one wakeful night three of four chapters are
created for the next morning's work.

As for the work itself, mine is, perhaps, strangely done, for often I
have