customary good-humoured banter, behind which lurked a good deal of sense and power:
"When one is a real romancer, you know, it is as easy to produce a romance as for an apple-tree to produce apples. This is how it is done.
"One gets one's paper, pen and ink; one sits down, as comfortably as possible, at a table not too high, not to low; one reflects for half an hour, one writes a little. After the title, comes Chapter I; then one writes thirty-five lines to a page, fifty letters to a line—for two hundred pages, if it is to be a romance in two volumes—for four hundred pages if in four volumes—for eight hundred pages, if in eight volumes, and so on. And after ten or twenty or forty days, supposing that one writes twenty pages between morning and evening, which means seven hundred lines, or 38,500 letters daily, the romance is finished.
"That is the way I work, say most of the critics who are good enough to concern themselves about me; and these gentlemen only forget one thing.
"It is this that before preparing the ink, the pens and the paper which must serve for the material in the development of a new romance, before drawing my arm-chair up to the table, before writing the title and those two very simple words 'Chapter I.,' I have sometimes thought for six
