attempted to reconcile my
private life with my public work without mentioning my husband. Because,
after all, it requires two people, a man and a woman, to organise a home,
and those two people must be in accord. It has been a sort of family creed
of ours that we do things together. We have tried, because of the varied
outside interests that pull hard, to keep the family life even more intact
than the average. Differing widely as they do, my husband's profession and
my career, we have been compelled to work apart. But we have relaxed,
rested and played, together.

"And this rule holds good for the family. Generally speaking, we have been
a sort of closed corporation, a board of five, with each one given a vote
and the right to cast it. Holidays and home matters, and picnics and dogs,
and everything that is of common interest all come up for a discussion in
which the best opinion wins. The small boy had a voice as well as the
biggest boy. And it worked well.

"It is not because we happened to like the same things. People do not
happen to like the same things. It is because we tried to, and it is
because we have really all grown up together.

"Thus in the summer we would spend weeks in the saddle in the mountains of
the Far West, or fishing in Canada. But let me be entirely frank here.
These outdoor summers were planned at first because there were four men
and one woman in our party. Now, however, I love the open as the men do."

=iv=

"Writing is a clean profession. The writer gets out of it exactly what he
puts in, no more and no less. It is one-man work. No one can help. The
writer works alone, solitary and unaided. And, contrary to the general
opinion, what the writer has done in the past does not help him in the
future. He must continue to make good, day after day.

"More than that he must manufacture a new article every day, and every
working hour of his day. He cannot repeat himself. Can you imagine a
manufacturer turning out something different all the time? And his income
stopping if he has a sick headache, or goes to a funeral?"

=v=

Next to the vitality, the variety of Mrs. Rinehart's work is most
noticeable. Her first novel, _The Circular Staircase_, was a mystery tale,
and so was her second, _The Man in Lower Ten_. She has, from time to time,
continued to write excellent mystery stories. _The Breaking Point_ is,
from one standpoint, a first class mystery story; and then there is that
enormously suc