This much as preliminary to this remark:  some day people will be able to call each other up from any part of the world and talk by mental telegraph—­and not merely by impression, the impression will be articulated into words.  It could be a terrible thing, but it won’t be, because in the upper civilizations everything like sentimentality (I was going to say sentiment) will presently get materialized out of people along with the already fading spiritualities; and so when a man is called who doesn’t wish to talk he will be like those visitors you mention:  “not chosen”—­and will be frankly damned and shut off.

Speaking of the ill luck of starting a piece of literary work wrong-and again and again; always aware that there is a way, if you could only think it out, which would make the thing slide effortless from the pen —­the one right way, the sole form for you, the other forms being for men whose line those forms are, or who are capabler than yourself:  I’ve had no end of experience in that (and maybe I am the only one—­let us hope so.) Last summer I started 16 things wrong—­3 books and 13 mag. articles—­and could only make 2 little wee things, 1500 words altogether, succeed:—­only that out of piles and stacks of diligently-wrought Ms., the labor of 6 weeks’ unremitting effort.  I could make all of those things go if I would take the trouble to re-begin each one half a dozen times on a new plan.  But none of them was important enough except one:  the story I (in the wrong form) mapped out in Paris three or four years ago and told you about in New York under seal of confidence—­no other person knows of it but Mrs. Clemens—­the story to be called “Which was the Dream?”

A week ago I examined the Ms—­10,000 words—­and saw that the plan was a totally impossible one-for me; but a new plan suggested itself, and straightway the tale began to slide from the pen with ease and confidence.  I think I’ve struck the right one this time.  I have already put 12,000 words of it on paper and Mrs. Clemens is pretty outspokenly satisfied with it-a hard critic to content.  I feel sure that all of the first half of the story—­and I hope three-fourths—­will be comedy; but by the former plan the whole of it (except the first 3 chapters) would have been tragedy and unendurable, almost.  I think I can carry the reader a long way before he suspects that I am laying a tragedy-trap.  In the present form I could spin 16 books out of it with comfort and joy; but I shall deny myself and restrict it to one. (If you should see a little short story in a magazine in the autumn called “My Platonic Sweetheart” written 3 weeks ago) that is not this one.  It may have been a suggester, though.

I expect all these singular privacies to interest you, and you are not to let on that they don’t.

We are leaving, this afternoon, for Ischl, to use that as a base for the baggage, and then gad around ten days among the lakes and mountains to rest-up Mrs. Clemens, who is jaded with housekeeping.  I hope I can get a chance to work a little in spots—­I can’t tell.  But you do it—­therefore why should you think I can’t?