The Duchess by Margaret Wolfe Hamilton

The characters in my novels, you ask how I conceive them? Once the plot is rescued from the misty depths of the mind, the characters come and range themselves readily enough. A scene, we will say, suggests itself--a garden, a flower show, a ball-room, what you will--and two people in it. A _young_ man and woman for choice. They are _always_ young with me, for that matter, for what, under the heaven we are promised, is so altogether perfect as youth! If any one of you, dear readers, is as bad a sleeper as I am, you will understand how thoughts swarm at midnight. Busy, bustling, stinging bees, they forbid the needed rest, and, thronging the idle brain, compel attention. Here in the silent hours the ghosts called characters walk, smiling, bowing, nodding, pirouetting, going like marionettes through all their paces.

At night I have had my gayest thoughts, at night my saddest. All things seem open then to that giant, Imagination. Here, lying in the dark, with as yet no glimmer of the coming dawn, no faintest light to show where the closed curtains join, too indolent to rise and light the lamp, too sleepy to put one's foot out of the well-warmed bed, praying fruitlessly for that sleep that will not come--it is at such moments as theses that my mind lays hold of the novel now in hand, and works away at it with a vigor, against which the natural desire for sleep hopelessly makes battle.