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Kathleen was the oldest girl. At nineteen she was to “come out” in San Francisco. A house had been taken in the city for the winter. Gowns had been ordered and “the cotillions joined” when Mrs. Thompson was stricken with pneumonia and died. Her husband died, broken-hearted, in less than a month afterward. Misfortunes culminating just after the father’s death left the six children “destitute, with the exception of the family home in Mill Valley, too large and too far from the city to be a negotiable asset.”

The children had never known what it was to want money. They behaved bravely. The oldest boy already had a small job. Kathleen got work at once with a hardware house at $30 a month. Her 15-year-old sister took three pupils “whose fees barely paid for her commutation ticket and carfares. The total of the little family’s income was about $80 a month. Their one terror—never realized—was of debt.”

Kathleen and her sister came home from the day’s work to get the dinner, make beds, wash dishes and scrub the kitchen floor at midnight. Kathleen, who had been a favorite story-teller all her life, began to wonder if she could not make money by writing. Her tales as a child had generally been illustrated with little pen drawings of girls with pigtails, girls in checkered aprons, girls in fancy dress, “and occasionally with more tragic pictures, such as widows and bereaved mothers mourning beside their departed.... There is a scrapbook in the family in which are pasted more than 1,000 of these sketches.” Now she was not thinking of illustrating stories, her own or others’, but of making needed money. In the fall of 1903 she had attempted to take a year’s course in the English department of the University of California and had had to give it up because the family needed her. In 1904, at the age of twenty-three, she made her first successful effort. The San Francisco Argonaut paid her $15.50 for a story called The Colonel and the Lady. Mrs. Norris was then librarian in the Mechanics’ Library and had more time to try writing. Such success as she had was not very encouraging. She left the library to go into settlement work, and for several months strove “to reanimate an already defunct settlement house.” She got her feet on the right path at last by becoming society editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. A few months later she became a reporter for the San Francisco Call, where she worked for two years.