d the lodgers
being hustled into it. She crossed the street and walked on, and never
saw her bag or baggage again. By the help of the Young Women's Christian
Association she found another room, in different surroundings, and set
out again to make the round of the editorial offices.

Then followed months and months of "writing, rewriting, rejections, and
re-rejections." From home came letters now beseeching, now commanding
her to return, and at length cutting off her allowance. So she returned
her rented typewriter and applied at a theatrical agency. She secured a
small part in a Broadway company, and then came her first acceptance of
a story, with an actual check for thirty dollars. She left the stage and
rented another typewriter,--but it was six months before she sold
another story.

In all this time she dipped deeply into the great stream of the city's
life. To quote her own account:

For a month I lived with an Armenian family on West Broadway, in a
room over a tobacconist's shop. I apprenticed myself as a
sales-girl in New York's most gigantic department store. Four and
one-quarter yards of ribbon at seven and a half cents a yard proved
my Waterloo, and my resignation at the end of one week was not
entirely voluntary. I served as waitress in one of New York's most
gigantic chain of white-tiled lunch rooms. I stitched boys' pants
in a Polish sweatshop, and lived for two days in New York's most
rococo hotel. I took a graduate course in Anglo Saxon at Columbia
University, and one in lamp-shade making at Wanamaker's: wormed
into a Broadway musical show as wardrobe girl, and went out on a
self-appointed newspaper assignment to interview the mother of the
richest baby in the world.

All these experiences yielded rich material for stories, but no one
would print them. Her money was gone; so was a diamond ring that had
been a Commencement present; it seemed as if there was nothing left but
to give up the struggle and go back home. Then, just as she had struck
bottom, an editor actually told her she could write, and followed up his
remark by buying three stories. Since that time she has never had a
story rejected, and her checks have gone up from two figures into four.
And so, at the end of a long fight, as she says, "I find myself at
twenty-nine exactly where at fourteen I had planned I would be. And best
of all, what popular success I am enjoying has