If he wished to describe an automobile turning in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description from which there was omitted no detail, which the most observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with reference to just such a turning.

Thereupon he would begin a process of omitting one by one those details which he had been at such pains to recall; and after each omission he would ask himself, 'Does the picture remain ?' If it did not, he restored the detail which he had just omitted, and experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the reader one of those swiftly flashed ice-clear pictures (complete in every detail) with which his tales and romances are so delightfully and continuously adorned.
"But it is quarter to eleven, and this being a time of holiday, R.H.
D.emerges from his workroom happy to think that he has placed one hundred and seven words between himself and the wolf who hangs about every writer's door.

He isn't satisfied with those hundred and seven words.

He never was in the least satisfied with anything that he wrote, but he has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes that under the circumstances they are the very best that he can do.
Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--after lunch.
"A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death he had denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits.

I have never seen him smoke automatically as most men do.