She told him that she read rapidly, 'a great deal at one gulp,' and thought in flashes--a way with the makers of phrases.

She wrote, she confessed, laboriously.

The desire to prune, compress, overcharge, was a torment to the nervous woman writing under a sharp necessity for payment.

Her songs were shot off on the impulsion; prose was the heavy task.

'To be pointedly rational,' she said, 'is a greater difficulty for me than a fine delirium.' She did not talk as if it would have been so, he remarks.