“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.
“And at last the very discerning head of the family made a stand. He said that no business man would try to sleep in his office, and yet that virtually was what I was doing.”
This from a doctor, forsooth! But perhaps Dr. Rinehart never bound up a cut in the little room just off the front parlor.
Nevertheless he was right. “I am at home as soon as the small boy is, or sooner,” Mrs. Rinehart proclaims. “And I am better for the change. It takes me out of the house. The short ride in the train or the motor to the city detaches me automatically from the grocery list and a frozen pipe in the garage.
“In the city I have two bright and attractive rooms. My desk is ready; my secretary is waiting. Sometimes I work all day; sometimes I look over my mail and go out to luncheon and do not come back.
“Then automatically the train or car going home detaches me from publishers and autograph hunters and pen and ink and paper. I am ready to play.”
She lives in Sewickley, a suburb of Pittsburgh. The home is known as Glen Osborne. She is not an early riser. “I like to let the day break on me gradually.” After breakfast there are household arrangements. She is no slave to her typewriter. “I may say that I work every week-day morning and perhaps three afternoons.” She goes riding, plays golf, visits the dressmaker the other three. She is a member of the Equal Franchise Association and of the Juvenile Court Association. There are long vacations, but what she sees and experiences a-traveling is usually rendered to her readers. “Thus in the summer we spend weeks in the saddle in the mountains of the Far West, or fishing in Canada.... 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 men do.” She writes about it better than many men do.
Mrs. Rinehart, in any account of herself, is certain to record the fact that she has never done newspaper work, although in recent years she has done “political and editorial writing.” She was never a newspaper reporter. The “moral equivalent,” as William James would have styled it, was, in her case, undoubtedly her hospital experience. Like any young nurse, she saw “life in the raw,” to borrow the unoriginal but completely expressive phrase used in her novel K. And then she had the great fortune to marry happily and to become a mother. This is the secret of her success, and all of it. Young and impressionable, she saw what life is at its most agonizing, most horrible, most heroic moments. Still young, but with her thoroughly normal and wholesome nature losing its plasticity and taking on a definite mold, she found what life can be in its permanent and most deeply satisfying beauty. Sympathy, genuine affection and sanative humor were hers in fair measure; when they failed her momentarily her husband replenished the healing store.
Her first novel, The Circular Staircase, was a mystery tale; so was her second, The Man in Lower Ten. They appeared in 1908 and 1909 respectively. Her first play had been produced in New York in 1907. This was Double Life, staged at the Bijou Theater. In conjunction with her husband, she wrote The Avenger (1908) and much later she collaborated with Avery Hopwood in the highly successful farce Seven Days. This was first played at the Astor Theater, New York. In 1913, at the Harris Theater, New York, her farce Cheer Up was put on. “Two plays were successful,” in Mrs. Rinehart’s opinion.