Kathleen and her sister came home from the day’s work to get the dinner, make beds, wash dishes and scrub the kitchen floor at midnight. Kathleen, who had been a favorite story-teller all her life, began to wonder if she could not make money by writing. Her tales as a child had generally been illustrated with little pen drawings of girls with pigtails, girls in checkered aprons, girls in fancy dress, “and occasionally with more tragic pictures, such as widows and bereaved mothers mourning beside their departed.... There is a scrapbook in the family in which are pasted more than 1,000 of these sketches.” Now she was not thinking of illustrating stories, her own or others’, but of making needed money. In the fall of 1903 she had attempted to take a year’s course in the English department of the University of California and had had to give it up because the family needed her. In 1904, at the age of twenty-three, she made her first successful effort. The San Francisco _Argonaut_ paid her $15.50 for a story called _The Colonel and the Lady_. Mrs. Norris was then librarian in the Mechanics’ Library and had more time to try writing. Such success as she had was not very encouraging. She left the library to go into settlement work, and for several months strove “to reanimate an already defunct settlement house.” She got her feet on the right path at last by becoming society editor of the San Francisco _Evening Bulletin_. A few months later she became a reporter for the San Francisco _Call_, where she worked for two years. “Mrs. Norris doesn’t know whether the newspaper experience helped or hindered her in her literary work.” There need be no uncertainty, we should think, when, as we are told in the next breath, “during these years she saw many phases of life that must have enlarged her vision and made her more catholic in her views.” She learned to write with speed. “During the visit of the Atlantic fleet to Pacific waters, in 1908, there was one day in which 8,000 words were Mrs. Norris’s contribution to the paper.” This may explain why she is one of the most prolific of American novelists. Long before _Josselyn’s Wife_ could be brought out in the fall of 1918, _Sisters_ had begun to be published serially. In April, 1909, Kathleen Thompson was married to Charles Gilman Norris, younger brother of Frank Norris, the author of _McTeague_ and _The Pit_. Charles Norris, now Capt. Charles Norris, U. S. A., is himself a novelist, the author of _The Amateur_ and _Salt: The Education of Griffith Adams_. Captain and Mrs. Norris, whose home is at Port Washington, Long Island, New York, have a son named after his distinguished uncle, Frank Norris.