I wrote my first real story while I was at Redmond. It was called “Averil’s Atonement,” and it had everything in it: a heroine of surpassing beauty, a misunderstanding, a noble sacrifice, a death, and some very fine descriptions of sunsets. I sent it to a magazine. The magazine sent it back.
I was not as crushed as I pretended. I put it away in a drawer and began another.
What I did not know was that Diana had read it, and loved it, and had quietly copied it out and sent it to a competition run by a baking powder company in Montreal, who were offering a prize for the best story that mentioned their product. Diana, who had never written a line of fiction in her life, had improved my story in two places. Averil’s cake turned out beautifully because she used the right baking powder. And the lovers, in the last paragraph, looked forward to a home in which they would never use any other kind.
It won. The prize was twenty-five dollars. Diana was so proud that she could hardly speak, and I could not speak at all, for quite different reasons.
I have had a good many stories printed since, in magazines with no opinions about baking powder. I have never been paid for anything with less pleasure, or kept anything longer. The letter from Montreal is still in my desk. It reminds me that the people who love you will sometimes do the most mortifying things on your behalf, and that it would be a poor sort of life in which nobody did.
