“And I believe,” Mrs. Atherton told Alma Luise Olsen in an interview appearing in _Books and the Book World_ of _The Sun_, New York, on March 31, 1918, “that I apply some of those same ideas to my writing of fiction to-day. Most lives are humdrum and commonplace, on the surface at least. So I take characters that haven’t had half a chance in real life and re-create their destinies for them and--well, my books are the result. I got the idea from Taine when I was very young.” This interview also threw interesting light on Mrs. Atherton’s novel, _The Avalanche_, announced for publication in the spring of 1919 by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. _The Avalanche_ is a tale of California society with a mystery plot, and deals with a young woman whose devoted but shrewd New York husband will not rest until he has solved the puzzle of appearances surrounding her. Mrs. Atherton, submerged most of the time in her New York apartment on Riverside Drive with war work--she returned from the European battlefronts to be the American head of Le Bien-être du Blesse, “the welfare of the wounded”--rose to the surface several days in the week at a quiet country spot in New Jersey, and wrote. The story developing thirteen chapters, she split the last in two. “I wrote and copied 50,000 words in seven weeks--which shows what one can do away from the telephone. Margaret Anglin told me the original incident and attempted to persuade me to write it as a play for her. Now that the book is finished she would never recognize any part of it but an incident in the climax. “That’s always the way with writing novels and stories. I never know how they are going to come out when I begin, any more than I could take a child right now and say just how I was going to shape its whole life. “Most writers who deal with California in their books tell about nature and the plain people and the proletariat and such things. No one but myself has ever told anything about social life in San Francisco. It is full of drama. It resembles New York in part, but it has a character all its own.” Mrs. Atherton works every morning from seven until noon, and does with dry bread and tea for a working lunch. Her New York apartment has balconied windows overlooking the Hudson. Before the door of the house which contains it stands a Barnard College dormitory. Eleanor Gates, writing in _Books and Authors_ for September, 1917, said: