“Life was very good to me at the beginning,” says Mrs. Rinehart. “It gave me a strong body, and it gave me my sons before it gave me my work. I do not know what would have happened had the work come first. But I should have had the children. I know that. I had always wanted them. Even my hospital experience, which rent the veil of life for me and showed it often terrible, could not change that fundamental thing we call the maternal instinct.... I would forfeit every particle of success that has come to me rather than lose any part, even the smallest, of my family life. It is on the foundation of my home that I have builded. “Yet, for a time, it seemed that my sons were to be all I was to have out of life. From twenty to thirty I was an invalid.... This last summer (1917), after forty days in the saddle through unknown mountains in Montana and Washington, I was as unwearied as they were. But I paid ten years for them.” She thinks that is how she came to write. She had always wanted to. She began in 1905--she was twenty-nine that year--and worked at a “tiny” mahogany desk or upon a card table, “so low and so movable. It can sit by the fire or in a sunny window.” She “learned to use a typewriter with my two fore-fingers, with a baby on my knee!” She wrote when the youngsters were out for a walk, asleep, playing. “It was frightfully hard.... I found that when I wanted to write I could not, and then when leisure came and I went to my desk, I had nothing to say.” Her first work was mainly short stories and poems. Her very first work was verse for children. Her first check was for $25, the reward of a short article telling how she had systematized the work of the household with two maids and a negro “buttons.” She sold one or two of the poems for children and with a sense of guilt at the desertion of her family made a trip to New York. She made the weary rounds in one day, “a heart-breaking day, going from publisher to publisher.” In two places she saw responsible persons and everywhere her verses were turned down. “But one man was very kind to me, and to that publishing house I later sent _The Circular Staircase_, my first novel. They published it and some eight other books of mine.”