That is to say, if I had been a strong girl.  As a matter-of-fact I was extremely delicate, with a weak back, a threat of tuberculosis, and very bad eyes.  Most of this was the result of over-study, for I had been a healthy child, but I loved books and was indifferent to exercise and nourishment.  No doubt if I had been turned out into the world to fare for myself I should have gone into a decline.  Therefore, it was sheer luck that betrayed me into matrimony, for although my mental energies were torpid for several years my first child seemed to dissipate the shadows that lay in my blood, and at twenty-five I was a normally strong woman.  We lived in the country.  My husband looked after the servants, and if we were without a cook for several days he filled her place (he had learned to cook “camping out” and liked nothing better) until my mother-in-law sent a woman from San Francisco.  I read, strolled about the woods, storing up vitality but often depressed with the unutterable ennui of youth, and haunted with the fear that my story-telling faculty, which had been very pronounced, had deserted me.

When my husband died I had but one child.  I left her with her two adoring grandmothers and fled to New York.  I was still as callow as a boarding-school girl, but my saving grace was that I knew I did not know anything, that I never would know enough to write about life until I had seen more of it than was on exhibition in California.

But by that time my health was established.  I felt quite equal to writing six books a year if any one would publish them, besides studying life at first hand as persistently and deeply as the present state of society will permit in the case of a mere woman.  For that reason I shall always be sorry I did not go on a newspaper for a year as a reporter, as there is no other way for a woman to see life in all its phases.  I had a letter to Charles Dana, owner of the New York Sun, and no doubt he would have put me to work, but I was still too pampered, or too snobbish, and, lacking the spur of necessity, missed one of the best of educations.  Now, no matter who asks my advice in regard to the literary career, whether she is the ambitious daughter of a millionaire or a girl whose talent is for the story and whose future depends upon herself, I invariably give her one piece of advice:  “Go on a newspaper.  Be a reporter.  Refuse no assignment.  Be thankful for a merciless City Editor and his blue pencil.  But, if you feel that you have the genuine story-telling gift, save your money and leave at the end of a year, or two years at most.”

As for myself, I absorbed life as best I could, met people in as many walks of life as possible.  As I would not marry again, and, in consequence, had no more children, nor suffered from the wearing monotonies of domestic life, I have always kept my health and been equal to an immense amount of work.

But the point is that I had been sheltered and protected during my delicate years.  No doubt it was a part of my destiny to hand on the intensely American qualities of body and mind I had inherited from my Dutch and English forefathers, as well as to do my share in carrying on the race.  But I got rid of all that as quickly as possible, and struck out for that plane of modern civilization planted and furrowed and replenished by daughters of men.