The Californians by Gertrude Atherton

It was midnight, and Magdalena was still awake; a storm raged, prohibitive of sleep. The wind screamed over the hills, tearing the long ribbons of rain to bits and flinging them in great handfuls against the windows; from which they rebounded to the porch to skurry down the pipes and gurgle into the pools of the soaked ground below. The roar of the ocean bore aloft another sound, a long heavy groan, -- the fog-horn of the Farallones. Magdalena imagined the wild scene beyond the Golden Gate: the ships driven out of their course, bewildered by the fog, the loud unceasing rattle of the rigging, the hungry boom of the breakers, the mountains and caverns of the raging Pacific. Her mind, open to impressions once more, stirred as it had not during its period of subservience to the heart, and toward expression. Suffering had not worked those wonders with her literary faculty of which she had read; but she certainly wrote with something more of fluency, something less of attenuated commonplace.

She had finished her first story; and although it by no means satisfied her, she had passed on to the next, determined to write them all; then, with the education accruing from long practice, to go back to the beginnings and make them literature.