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This interview also threw interesting light on Mrs. Atherton’s novel, The Avalanche, announced for publication in the spring of 1919 by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York. The Avalanche is a tale of California society with a mystery plot, and deals with a young woman whose devoted but shrewd New York husband will not rest until he has solved the puzzle of appearances surrounding her. Mrs. Atherton, submerged most of the time in her New York apartment on Riverside Drive with war work—she returned from the European battlefronts to be the American head of Le Bien-être du Blesse, “the welfare of the wounded”—rose to the surface several days in the week at a quiet country spot in New Jersey, and wrote. The story developing thirteen chapters, she split the last in two.

“I wrote and copied 50,000 words in seven weeks—which shows what one can do away from the telephone. Margaret Anglin told me the original incident and attempted to persuade me to write it as a play for her. Now that the book is finished she would never recognize any part of it but an incident in the climax.