Marriage, a home in New York City, and the first leisure since her father’s death; a literary atmosphere (her husband was in magazine editorial work), and the happiness of being in the city she had for years longed to know-these are the circumstances which reawakened Mrs. Norris’s ambition to write. She essayed again without encouragement from editors except the editor at the breakfast table. Her newspaper training now seemed to handicap her, “her fiction lacked the simplicity and the appeal that have since endeared it to so many readers.” For months she got nothing but rejections. Finally this note popped out of the mail: “Dear Mrs. Norris: “The readers report that, delightful as this story is, it is ‘not quite in our tone.’ The feeling of the _Atlantic_ is, that when a tale is as intimately true to life as this is of yours, the tone is surely a tone for the _Atlantic_ to adopt. “It gives us much pleasure to accept so admirable a story. “Very truly yours, “THE EDITOR.” The story that was “not quite in our tone” but that so impressed Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, was _What Happened to Alanna_. On its publication S. S. McClure wrote to Mrs. Norris asking for her next work. She replied, giving him the date on which _What Happened to Alanna_ had been submitted to _McClure’s Magazine_ and the date on which it had been returned to her. Her next six stories appeared in _McClure’s_. After that it seemed to the casual observer as if they were everywhere. In one month Mrs. Norris was on five tables of contents. And then the _Delineator_ offered a prize for a story of not more than 3,000 words. Mrs. Norris began one, and when she saw that it would run to 10,000 words, she laid it aside and wrote another. So the _Delineator_ lost and the _American Magazine_ gained _Mother_. On the story’s appearance five publishers asked Mrs. Norris to enlarge it sufficiently to make a book. Enlarging short stories into novels is a ticklish business. Successes are few. Mrs. Norris added 20,000 words to her short story. How well she did it is evidenced by the dozens of editions through which the book has run and more remarkably by the fact that Edward Bok, editor of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_, paid a high price for the privilege of running the novel as a serial _after_ its publication as a book. This is apparently a unique instance.