The little details were very interesting, but absolutely no time was allowed to me.

It was required that the first portion of my book should be in the printer's hands within a month.

Now it was my theory,--and ever since this occurrence has been my practice,--to see the end of my own work before the public should see the commencement.[4] If I did this thing I must not only abandon my theory, but instantly contrive a story, or begin to write it before it was contrived.

That was what I did, urged by the interesting nature of the details.

A novelist cannot always at the spur of the moment make his plot and create his characters who shall, with an arranged sequence of events, live with a certain degree of eventful decorum, through that portion of their lives which is to be portrayed.