“I was born near Denton, Maryland, a small town located in the ‘sandy belt’ of the Eastern Shore. It is a narrow-minded, kind-hearted, conventional, self-respecting community, not very enterprising--an average little semi-Southern town. My father had a nursery and fruit farm, and cared more, I think, for beautiful trees than he did for people. We had lovely arborvitæ and red japonica hedges, magnolia trees, an extraordinary collection of evergreens, and many unusual foreign flowering shrubs. “I went to school at Denton, the public school, and the embryo High School of twenty to twenty-five years ago. And then I went to college. “As a child I read everything that I could lay hands on and we always had books and magazines at home. But my reading was not guided and it was my great misfortune not to find among my teachers, either in school or college, even one with any special mental quality or deep and sound culture, or even any vital enthusiasm--with the exception of the psychology teacher at college. “I began to write at college, the sort of imitative stuff that most college girls write--very highbrow essays on Maeterlinck, and that kind of thing. Not much fiction or poetry, as I remember. But I had my ideas of a writing career, for all that. When I was graduated from college I was just eighteen and I came home and told my father that I was going to be an author and he might as well buy me a typewriter--I was always of a severely practical turn of mind. I got the typewriter and began to write stories, first in longhand, then copying them single-spaced on the machine; they made terrifying manuscripts. One got into the _Ladies’ World_, and one into the _Country Gentleman_, and one into _Truth_, which was then a flourishing publication. And about that time, after I had been home for a couple of years, at the suggestion of an old friend of my father’s I went to the University of Vermont for a year of graduate work. And I began to take a special course in history there with Professor Samuel Emerson. “I tell this with particularity, because it was the very best thing that ever happened to me. As I worked with Professor Emerson, I gradually and painfully became aware that I did not know how to use my mind, and that my education was of the most shocking superficiality. I learned that I didn’t know how to think. I will admit that I was surprised and oh, how humiliated! If I’d only thrown myself on Professor Emerson’s mercy and told him that I knew my shortcomings and asked him to help me! But I was too youthfully proud for that, and I went on, dimly trying to get at the thing myself and marking with a hopeless appreciation, which would have doubtless amazed the Professor had he guessed it, the truly wonderful way in which he used his own exceptional intellectuality.