steps in and
says:

"See here, you can't stand this! You've got to forget it."

This is the breaking point, the moment when amnesia intervenes. But later
there may come a time when the erected wall safeguarding the secondary
personality gives way. The first, submerged or walled-off personality may
step across the levelled barrier. That extraordinarily dramatic moment
does come in the new novel and is handled by Mrs. Rinehart with triumphant
skill.

It will be seen that this new novel bears some resemblances to _K_, by
many of her readers considered Mrs. Rinehart's most satisfactory story. If
I may venture a personal opinion, _The Breaking Point_ is a much stronger
novel than _K_. To me it seems to combine the excellence of character
delineation noticeable in _K_ with the dramatic thrill and plot
effectiveness which made _The Amazing Interlude_ so irresistible as you
read it.

=ii=

To say so much is to bear the strongest testimony to that superb vitality,
which, characteristic of Mrs. Rinehart as a person, is yet more
characteristic of her fiction. There is, I suppose, this additional
interest in regard to _The Breaking Point_, that Mrs. Rinehart is the wife
of a physician and was herself, before her marriage, a trained nurse. The
facts of her life are interesting, though not nearly so interesting as the
way in which she tells them.

She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia (Gilleland)
Roberts of Pittsburgh. From the city's public and high schools she went
into a training school for nurses, acquiring that familiarity with
hospital scenes which served her so well when she came to write _The
Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_, the stories collected under the
title of _Tish_ and the novel _K_. She became, at nineteen, the wife of
Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician.

"Life was very good to me at the beginning," said Mrs. Rinehart in the
_American Magazine_ article I have referred to. "It gave me a strong body
and it gave me my sons before it gave me my work. I do not know what would
have happened had the work come first, but I should have had the children.
I know that. I had always wanted them. Even my hospital experience, which
rent the veil of life for me, and showed it often terrible, could not
change that fundamental thing we call the maternal instinct.... I would
forfeit every part of success that has come to me rather than lose any
part, even the smallest, of my family