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“I AM being very frank,” exclaims Mary Roberts Rinehart. As if she ever were otherwise! “I have never had any illusions about the work I do. I am, frankly, a story-teller. Some day I may be a novelist.

“I want to write life. But life is not always clean and happy. It is sometimes mean and sordid and cheap. These are the shadows that outline the novelist’s picture. But I will never write anything which I cannot place in my boys’ hands.”

Thus Mrs. Rinehart in the American Magazine for October, 1917. It is almost all you need to know to understand her work. Almost, but not quite. Add this:

“I sometimes think, if I were advising a young woman as to a career, that I should say: ‘First pick your husband.’”

Mary Roberts (as she was) picked hers at nineteen and was married to him nearly four months before she became twenty. That was in 1896; dates are not one of her concealments. In fact, she has no concealments, only reticences.

She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia (Gilleland) Roberts of Pittsburgh, and had been a pupil of the city’s public and high schools, then of a training school for nurses where she acquired that familiarity with hospital scenes which was necessary in writing The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry, the stories collected under the title Tish and the novel K. And then she became the wife of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician. And then——