first day or two, a very poor cheap
element, quite unreal, unrealized, a mere man of straw to be knocked
over by the personages of the tale. Then I took myself to task, told
myself that I was spoiling a story merely to revenge myself on a man I
cared nothing about, and that I must either take Cousin Horace out or
make him human. One day, working in the garden, I laughed out suddenly,
delighted with the whimsical idea of making him, almost in spite of
himself, the _deus ex machina_ of my little drama, quite soft and
sympathetic under his shell of would-be worldly disillusion, as
occasionally happens to elderly bachelors.

At this point the character of 'Niram's long-dead father came to life
and tried to push his way into the story, a delightful, gentle, upright
man, with charm and a sense of humor, such as none of the rest of my
stark characters possessed. I felt that he was necessary to explain the
fierceness of the sisters' rivalry for him. I planned one or two ways to
get him in, in retrospect--and liked one of the scenes better than
anything that finally was left in the story. Finally, very
heavy-hearted, I put him out of the story, for the merely material
reason that there was no room for him. As usual with my story-making,
this plot was sprouting out in a dozen places, expanding, opening up,
till I perceived that I had enough material for a novel. For a day or so
I hung undecided. Would it perhaps be better to make it a novel and
really tell about those characters all I knew and guessed? But again a
consideration that has nothing to do with artistic form, settled the
matter. I saw no earthly possibility of getting time enough to write a
novel. So I left Mr. Purdon out, and began to think of ways to compress
my material, to make one detail do double work so that space might be
saved.

One detail of the mechanism remained to be arranged, and this ended by
deciding the whole form of the story, and the first-person character of
the recital. This was the question of just how it would have been
materially possible for the bed-ridden old woman to break down the
life-long barrier between her and her sister, and how she could have
reached her effectively and forced her hand. I could see no way to
manage this except by somehow transporting her bodily to the sister's
house, so that she could not be put out on the road without public
scandal. This transportation must be managed by some character not in
the main action, as n