Solitaire by Blanche Colton Williams — Read

STARTING POINT. "You ask about the origin of ‘Solitaire,' which chances to be rather easier to trace than the origin of most of the stories I have written, since I more often begin with an abstract ‘idea' and work outward to character and plot. When a story begins otherwise I have discovered (and all such things are matters of discovery after the fact, and never of premeditation) that it is almost invariably the result of some purely _visual_ impression of a single person, detached from any incident or complication. A stranger, seen once, who recurs again and again to my mind, and about whom my curiosity increases, I have learned to rely upon, in a kind of occult unstatable way, to bring home his own plot.

"The opening scene of ‘Solitaire' is an exact transcript of one of those visual impressions. I did see the man who afterward became ‘Corey' in the restaurant of a small Paris hotel. My vis-à-vis did say, ‘Look at the American! ' and I did turn to meet the twinkle I have described in the story. The curious thing is that I cannot now remember whether he wore a decorative ribbon or not. My impression is that he did not, for it was not until several weeks later that the idea of decorations as a ‘motive' occurred to me. What mattered, what really roused my curiosity, was my _surprise_ at seeing him there, when I knew nothing at all about the man, -- my immediate sense of his playing a strange rôle, of his being away from home. He _was_ a physician, he had been working in the Balkans, and he was going back again the next day. Also he had been in Russia. These things he told me after dinner in the salon, when we talked together; and he was from the Middle West, and called it ‘God's country' and said he wanted to get back. I did not see him after that night, but he kept coming into my mind, and each time I would wonder how he had ever come into my mind, and each time I would wonder how he had ever come to leave his home in the Middle West, and in the end it became, I suppose, a kind of subconscious abstract problem. At any rate the solution appeared one day -- and all I had then to do was to write the story. So, after all, it was a story of ‘idea' worked out to plot, -- but a visual impression put the idea into my head. One thing only, I believe, I knew all the time, -- that whatever his motive was, he was as much in the dark about it as I. That, perhaps, was what attracted me, what kept my curiosity alive, and what, in the end, made it an acceptable story. " -- _Fleta Campbell Springer._