The authoress and I give each other a look which means that children will be children, and then we go indoors. "Are you not going to play any more?" cries Maurice to the authoress. She blushes a little. "I was playing with him," she explains, "to keep him out of mischief till mamma comes back." In the drawing-room we talk for a time of ordinary matters--of the allowances one must make for a child like Maurice, for instance--and gradually we drift to the subject of literature. I know literary people sufficiently well to be aware that they will talk freely--almost too freely--of their work if approached in the proper spirit. "Are you busy just now?" I ask, with assumed carelessness, and as if I had not been preparing the question since I heard papa was out. She looks at me, suspiciously, as authors usually do when asked such a question. They are not certain whether you are really sympathetic. However, she reads honesty in my eyes. "Oh, well, I am doing a little thing." (They always say this.) "A story or an article?" "A story." "I hope it will be good." "I don't know. I don't like it much." (This is another thing they say, and then they wait for you to express incredulity.) "I have no doubt it will be a fine thing. Have you given it a name?" "Oh, yes; I always write the name. Sometimes I don't write any more." As she was in a confidential mood this seemed an excellent chance for getting her views on some of the vexed literary questions of the day. For instance, everybody seems to be more interested in hearing during what hours of the day an author writes than in reading his book. "Do you work best in the early part of the day or at night?" "I write my stories just before tea." "That surprises me. Most writers, I have been told, get through a good deal of work in the morning." "Oh, but I go to school as soon as breakfast is over." "And you don't write at night?" "No; nurse always turns the gas down." I had read somewhere that among the novelist's greatest difficulties is that of sustaining his own interest in a novel day by day until it is finished. "Until your new work is completed do you fling your whole heart and soul into it? I mean, do you work straight on at it, so to speak, until you have finished the last chapter?" "Oh, yes." The novelists were lately reproved in a review for working too quickly, and it was said that one wrote a whole novel in two months. "How long does it take you to write a novel?" "Do you mean a long novel?" "Yes." "It takes me nearly an hour." "For a really long novel?" "Yes, in three volumes. I write in three exercise-books--a volume in each." "You write very quickly." "Of course, a volume doesn't fill a whole exercise-book. They are penny exercise-books. I have a great many three-volume stories in the three exercise-books." "But are they really three-volume novels?" "Yes, for they are in chapters, and one of them has twenty chapters." "And how many chapters are there in a page?"