Response depends entirely on how much the thing described, well or ill, interests me.
Each its own picture.
Not a bit, unless I resent them as images. But suggestion, leaving me to do the rest, is what I most enjoy.
I do not know.
As tools? No.
Inez Haynes Irwin: I would say yes to all these questions. I enjoy fiction intensely. All my life I have been the easy prey of fiction writers. Allowing that sometimes the mind gets fatigued and ceases to register impressions (although I do not remember ever to have had this experience) I would say that I saw, heard, tasted, smelled and felt all the things the author wanted me to see, hear, taste, smell and feel. I do seem in imagination actually to feel physical pain when the author wishes me to do so. Recently while suffering from an attack of grippe I had to stop reading a novel, Dorothy Speare's Dancers in the Dark, because the opening chapters described the fatigue of a group of girls who had danced all night. Their fatigue added so much to my weakness that I could not go on with the story. I remember once reading an essay by John Burroughs on The Apple. When I had finished it, I had to go out and buy an apple to eat, although ordinarily I don't care for apples.
I am particularly susceptible to color in writing; and I find that I enjoy particularly the work of those writers who have studied art or have been artists. Du Maurier's books were a great joy to me and if Hergesheimer had nothing else to interest me, I think I should read him for the wonderful color arrangements in his descriptions. Java Head is remarkable in this respect. Robert Chambers has some of this color quality too; so, of course, to an extraordinary degree, has Conrad.
The pictures I see in my imagination are always colored as the author directs me to color them.
I do not think details are blurred in my imagined version of the author's picture—except when I have read too hurriedly or skipped.
I have studied arithmetic, algebra, plane geometry and solid geometry. The higher the mathematics the better I liked it. I was exceptionally stupid in arithmetic but I enjoyed plane and solid geometry enormously. It appealed to my imagination.