“I sent my stuff to Mr. Dreiser in advance and next day I went down to see what he thought of it. I was pretty well scared. I walked around the Butterick Building--four times I walked around that bulky flatiron before I screwed up enough courage to go in. When I finally got inside and was ushered into Mr. Dreiser’s office [the novelist was then editor of the _Delineator_, a job Mrs. Willsie now holds] I was tongue-tied with nervousness. That nervousness might well have been prophetic. The interview turned out to be a momentous one for me. “‘My God!’ said Mr. Dreiser, looking me over. ‘Another infant come to New York to reform it.’ But after a little talk he offered me a job, editorial work at a good salary. “‘I’ll have to think that over,’ I said, the temptation of a good regular salary struggling against my plans for writing, and writing only. “‘No,’ Mr. Dreiser ordered. ‘You sit right there and decide now.’ “So I sat there and thought about it and finally I told him that I wouldn’t take his job. I had stuck out this far and I guessed I could go on. “‘All right,’ Mr. Dreiser agreed without argument. ‘Stick it out at the writing game if you want to. It won’t be easy, but you will make good. You will have a hard time at first, and you will need pluck. But in five years you will land and land big. As for these stories of yours, I will buy them.’ And he named a sum staggering to my inexperience, though he assured me he was taking advantage of me because I was unknown. “Well, I kept on writing. I bought a second-hand typewriter and worked it with two fingers and many times I thought of the salary I might have had coming in every week. As Mr. Dreiser said, it wasn’t easy. I made $500 that first year. Things came out my way because I stuck to my plan and always kept my eye on the future--and had the courage to refuse that job.” Not long afterward Mrs. Willsie’s stories began to appear in the magazines and were unusually popular. She took up the writing of special articles for such periodicals as _Harper’s Weekly_ and _Collier’s_ on important subjects--immigration, divorce, Indians, the United States Reclamation Service. Norman Hapgood, who was then editor of _Harper’s Weekly_, said of her work: “She has the ability to get at the essentials of a big question, and put it in simple, human terms.” Mrs. Willsie’s first published novel was _The Heart of the Desert_, which came out in 1913. It won immediate recognition for her. Richard Le Gallienne, writing an appreciation of Mrs. Willsie in the _Book News Monthly_ of March, 1917, said: