s a banker's family regards his bank.'"

Most of the work of the twelve years from 1905 to 1917 was done in Mrs.
Rinehart's home. But when she had a long piece of work to do she often
felt "the necessity of getting away from everything for a little while."
So, beginning about 1915, she rented a room in an office building in
Pittsburgh once each year while she was writing a novel. It was sparsely
furnished and, significantly, it contained no telephone. In 1917 she
became a commuter from her home in Sewickley, a Pittsburgh suburb. Her
earnings had risen to $50,000 a year and more.

"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
dramatisations, 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."

More recently, Mrs. Rinehart has become a resident of Washington, D. C.
Her husband is engaged in the Government health service and the family
lives in the Wardman Park Hotel, having taken the apartment of the late
Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania.

=iii=

"Yet, if I were to begin again, I would go through it all, the rejections
at the beginning, the hard work, the envious and malicious hands reached
up to pull down anyone who has risen ever so little above his fellows. Not
for the money reward, although that has been large, not for the publicity,
although I am frank enough to say I would probably miss being pointed out
in a crowd! But because of two things: the friends I have made all over
the world, and the increased outlook and a certain breadth of perception
and knowledge that must come as the result of years of such labour. I am
not so intolerant as in those early days. I love my kind better. I find
the world good, to work and to play in.

"I sometimes think, if I were advising a young woman as to a career, that
I should say: 'First, pick your husband.'

"It is impossible to try to tell how I have