_A Whirl Asunder_, 1895. Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. Now out of print. _Patience Sparhawk and Her Times_, 1897. Stokes. _His Fortunate Grace_, 1897. John Lane Company. New York. Now out of print. _American Wives and English Husbands_, 1898. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York. _The Californians_, 1898. Stokes. _A Daughter of the Vine_, 1899. Lane. _The Valiant Runaways_, 1899. Dodd, Mead. _Senator North_, 1900. Lane. _The Aristocrats_, 1901. Lane. _The Conqueror_, 1902. Stokes. _The Splendid Idle Forties_, 1902. Stokes. _A Few of Hamilton’s Letters_, 1903. Stokes. _Rulers of Kings_, 1904. Harper & Brothers, New York. _The Bell in the Fog_, 1905. Harper. _The Travelling Thirds_, 1905. Harper. _Ancestors_, 1907. Harper. _The Gorgeous Isle_, 1908. Doubleday, Page & Company. Not listed in their last catalogue. _Tower of Ivory_, 1910. Stokes. _Julia France and Her Times_, 1912. Stokes. _Perch of the Devil_, 1914. Stokes. _California--An Intimate History_, 1914. Harper. _Before the Gringo Came_ (Combining _The Doomswoman_, published in 1892, and _Rezanov_, published in 1906), 1915. Stokes. _Mrs. Balfame_, 1916. Stokes. _The Living Present_, 1917. Stokes. _The White Morning_, 1918. Stokes. _The Avalanche_, 1919. Stokes. _The Sisters-in-Law_, 1921. Stokes. _Sleeping Fires_, 1922. Stokes. CHAPTER V MARY ROBERTS RINEHART “I am being very frank,” exclaims Mary Roberts Rinehart. As if she ever were otherwise! “I have never had any illusions about the work I do. I am, frankly, a story-teller. Some day I may be a novelist. “I want to write life. But life is not always clean and happy. It is sometimes mean and sordid and cheap. These are the shadows that outline the novelist’s picture. But I will never write anything which I cannot place in my boys’ hands.” Thus Mrs. Rinehart in the _American Magazine_ for October, 1917. It is almost all you need to know to understand her work. Almost, but not quite. Add this: “I sometimes think, if I were advising a young woman as to a career, that I should say: ‘First pick your husband.’” Mary Roberts (as she was) picked hers at nineteen and was married to him nearly four months before she became twenty. That was in 1896; dates are not one of her concealments. In fact, she has no concealments, only reticences. She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia (Gilleland) Roberts of Pittsburgh, and had been a pupil of the city’s public and high schools, then of a training school for nurses where she acquired that familiarity with hospital scenes which was necessary in writing _The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_, the stories collected under the title _Tish_ and the novel _K._ And then she became the wife of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician. And then----