Dick had a great deal to think about when he went to bed an hour or two before the sun rose. But the desire to write his novel was stronger in his mind than anything else, except his grief over the loss of Dr. Goode. He felt that his plot was a good one--original and bright. His newspaper letters had met with great success; why should his novel not do as well? For the next week he toiled away, every afternoon and part of the night, till his letters were finished. When the last one was done he laid down his pen with some regret. “Now for space work,” he said to himself, “and what I hope will be the best work I have done yet. The novel is so thoroughly laid out that I have nothing to do but write it. It may not go at all; it may fall flat or be laughed at; but I am going to do my best with it. If I can write one novel that will go, I can write more.” He fell to work at it at once, stopping only when Darling gave him special work to do for the office. At the end of a fortnight Darling asked him how the novel was coming on. “Oh, I’m learning!” he laughed. “I know more about novel-writing now than I did two weeks ago, at any rate. Didn’t I tell you that I had it all so well laid out in my mind that I had only to do the actual writing? Well, I really believed that, which just shows how little I knew about the trade. Why, Darling, I wrote the opening sentences a dozen times before I got them to suit me! After the first two chapters were done I saw how very much the whole opening scheme might be improved, so I threw them away and began over again. I’m on my fifth chapter now, but there’s hardly a line that has not been written two or three times over.” “I’m glad of that,” Darling said; “nothing but hard pulling will produce good work. How much do you do every day?” “Well, after I go down to the office to see whether I’m needed, I do a thousand words in the afternoon. That is my regular afternoon’s work. Then after dinner, with the whole night before me, I hope for two thousand words more. You know I am a very rapid penman. But I don’t push myself at night. If I’m not in the mood, I read for an hour or two. That generally puts me in proper trim.” “What do you read? Shakespeare?” “No,” Dick replied; “never while I’m writing. He is a capital stimulant at other times, but in the midst of writing I find he confuses me. His heroic style is so totally different from the modern style that there must be an interval between. No; at those times I want a language nearer to the language I use myself, and I find it in Thackeray--usually in Vanity Fair.” “I have heard other writers say the same thing,” Darling acquiesced. “A writer unconsciously imitates to some extent the style he has just been reading. At least, so I understand; a managing editor, you know, is a complicated machine for watching the news of the world and getting it all into his own paper. He cannot be expected to be an expert in literary style.”