Now you will ask what sort of English it is I write at this lightning speed. So far as I can tell, the best I ever wrote! I have read it aloud as I have gone on, to one friend of keen literary perceptions and judgment, the most purely intellectual woman I know-Mrs. Trimble. She says it is smooth, strong, clear--“Tremendous” is her frequent epithet. I read the first ten chapters to Miss Woolsey this last week — she has been spending a few days with me . . . but she says, “Far better than anything you ever have done.”
The success of it — if it succeeds — will be that I do not even suggest my Indian history till the interest is so assured in the heroine — and hero — that people will not lay the book down. There is but one Indian in the story.
Every now & then I force myself to stop & write a short story or a bit of verse: I can't bear the strain: but the instant I open the pages of the other I write as I am writing now — as fast as I could copy! What do you think? Am I possessed of a demon? Is it a freak of mental disturbance, or what?
