which was likely to make me nervous, since it seemed to set a standard
which I should find it hard to preserve in the future. But in truth the
newspaper was right which said that the book read as though it was
written at a sitting, and that it was a tour de force. The facts are
that the book was written, printed, revised, and ready for press in five
weeks.

The manuscript of the book was complete within four weeks. It possessed
me. I wrote night and day. There were times when I went to bed and,
unable to sleep, I would get up at two o'clock or three o'clock in the
morning and write till breakfast time. A couple of hours' walk after
breakfast, and I would write again until nearly two o'clock. Then
luncheon; afterwards a couple of hours in the open air, and I would again
write till eight o'clock in the evening. The world was shut out. I
moved in a dream. The book was begun at Hot Springs, in Virginia, in the
annex to the old Hot Springs Hotel. I could not write in the hotel
itself, so I went to the annex, and in the big building--in the early
spring-time--I worked night and day. There was no one else in the place
except the old negro caretaker and his wife. Four-fifths of the book was
written in three weeks there. Then I went to New York, and at the Lotus
Club, where I had a room, I finished it--but not quite. There were a few
pages of the book to do when I went for my walk in Fifth Avenue one
afternoon. I could not shake the thing off, the last pages demanded to
be written. The sermon which the old Cure was preaching on Valmond's
death was running in my head. I could not continue my walk. Then and
there I stepped into the Windsor Hotel, which I was passing, and asked if
there was a stenographer at liberty. There was. In the stenographer's
office of the Windsor Hotel, with the life of a caravanserai buzzing
around me, I dictated the last few pages of When Valmond Came to Pontiac.
It was practically my only experience of dictation of fiction. I had