rote sitting down. He wrote standing up. And, almost you may say,
he wrote walking up and down. Some people, accustomed to the delicious
ease and clarity of his style, imagine that he wrote very easily. He
did and he didn't. Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously
human, flowed from him without let or hindrance. That masterpiece of
corresponding, "The German March through Brussels," was probably
written almost as fast as he could talk (next to Phillips Brooks he was
the fastest talker I ever heard), but when it came to fiction he had no
facility at all. Perhaps I 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.
Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--after lunch.

A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death he had
denied himself the luxury