“The book was practically conceived and written in a single night. But, ordinarily, I just live with my characters after they have come to me. Of course it is usually the leading character of a story that occurs to me first, and then I let him or her gather about them the characters which they would naturally know or come in contact with. Then I just let them say the things which they would naturally say to each other. Of course I accept and reject what my characters shall say in print, coördinating and assorting it into the plot; but they develop the plot. “My hours are from 9 to 12 in the morning. Whatever I write comes to me perfectly easily and naturally, and I rarely ever make any change in my first copy. My mother used to say that I wrote just as other people hemmed handkerchiefs. Writing has never meant any struggle whatever to me. “Stories are to entertain, and they cannot do this if they are unhappy, and then, all my early stories I used to read to my father, and he particularly disliked anything that was unhappy in them and urged me to take it out.” Among Mrs. Burnham’s close friends are the brothers George Barr McCutcheon, the novelist, and John McCutcheon, the cartoonist; and George Ade. Charles Klein, the playwright, was a personal friend also. It is improper to use the word trilogy in speaking of Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science novels, since a trilogy, rightly speaking, is a group of three novels in which one or more characters persist, or which have a common setting. If we can speak of a trilogy based on an idea or set of ideas then Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science trilogy consists of _The Right Princess_ (1902), _Jewel_ (1903) and _The Leaven of Love_ (1908). _The Opened Shutters_ (1906) is free from the special terminology of the Scientists, though saturated with their principles and beliefs in the character of Thinkright Johnson and later of Sylvia Lacey. _Heart’s Haven_ (1918) is Mrs. Burnham’s account of May Ca’line, a village beauty who, as between two lovers, kept faith with the one to whom she had betrothed herself. Her son marries a girl of no breeding and is saved from disaster by his mother’s rejected lover, whose story he does not know. May Ca’line herself is later the means of restoring her son’s fortunes. There is a double love story very pleasantly told and very happily worked out.