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."

Mrs. Rinehart had always wanted to write. 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 forefingers with a
baby on my knee!" She wrote when the children 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."

I quote from a chapter on Mrs. Rinehart in my book _The Women Who Make Our
Novels_:

"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 systematised the work of a 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 heartbreaking 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.'

"In her first year of sustained effort at writing, Mrs. Rinehart made
about $l,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 humour 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 a