Opportunely for me there was a great street-car strike in New York, and the story began to find its way to issues nobler and larger than those of the love-affairs common to fiction.

I was in my fifty-second year when I took it up, and in the prime, such as it was, of my powers.

The scene which I had chosen appealed prodigiously to me, and the action passed as nearly without my conscious agency as I ever allow myself to think such things happen.
The opening chapters were written in a fine, old fashioned apartment house which had once been a family house, and in an uppermost room of which I could look from my work across the trees of the little park in Stuyvesant Square to the towers of St.George's Church.

Then later in the spring of 1889 the unfinished novel was carried to a country house on the Belmont border of Cambridge.

There I must have written very rapidly to have pressed it to conclusion before the summer ended.