In her first year of sustained effort at writing, Mrs. Rinehart made about $1,200. She was surrounded by “sane people who cried me down,” but who were merry without being contemptuous. Her husband has been her everlasting help. He “has stood squarely behind me, always. His belief in me, his steadiness and his sanity and his humor have kept me going, when, as has happened now and then, my little world of letters has shaken under my feet.” To the three boys their mother’s work has been a matter of course ever since they can remember. “I did not burst on them gloriously. I am glad to say that they think I am a much better mother than I am a writer, and that the family attitude in general has been attentive but not supine. They regard it exactly as a banker’s family regards his bank.” Sometimes, Mrs. Rinehart, a banker’s family regards his bank as a confounded nuisance! But that’s when the bank takes charge of the man and demands an undue share of his time and energy. You have never let your writing do that. With you it has been family first! Most of the work of the twelve years from 1905 to 1917 which witnessed your signal success was done in your home. But sometimes when you had a long piece of work to do you felt, as you tell us, “the necessity of getting away from everything for a little while.” So, beginning about 1915, you rented a room in an office building in Pittsburgh once each year while you had a novel in hand. It was barely furnished and the most significant omission was a telephone. There you got through “a surprising amount of work.” And then, in 1917, you became a commuter. Your earnings had risen from the $1,200 of that first year to $50,000 and possibly more in a twelve-month. But let us have the story in your own words: “My business with its various ramifications had been growing; an enormous correspondence, involving business details, foreign rights, copyrights, moving picture rights, translation rights, second serial rights, and dramatizations, had made from the small beginning of that book of poems a large and complicated business. “I had added political and editorial writing to my other work, and also records of travel. I was quite likely to begin the day with an article opposing capital punishment, spend the noon hours in the Rocky Mountains, and finish off with a love story! “I developed the mental agility of a mountain goat! Filing cases entered into my life, card index systems. To glance into my study after working hours was dismaying. “And at last the very discerning head of the family made a stand. He said that no business man would try to sleep in his office, and yet that virtually was what I was doing.” This from a doctor, forsooth! But perhaps Dr. Rinehart never bound up a cut in the little room just off the front parlor.