Romance Norris, Kathleen Thompson: Saturday's Child. V1. 15 Oct 2009

[crutledge]

Kathleen Thompson Norris (July 16, 1880, San Francisco, California – January 18, 1966, Palo Alto, California) was an American novelist and wife of fellow writer Charles Norris, whom she wed in 1909. She was educated in a special course at the University of California and wrote many popular romance novels that some considered sentimental and honest in their prose. Norris was the highest-paid female writer of her time, and many of her novels are held in high regard today. Many of her novels were set in California, particularly the San Francisco area. They feature detailed descriptions of the upper-class lifestyle. After 1910 she contributed to Atlantic, The American Magazine, McClure's, Everybody's, Ladies' Home Journal and Woman's Home Companion.

Excerpt
Not the place in which to look for the Great Adventure, the dingy, narrow office on the mezzanine floor of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter’s great wholesale drug establishment, in San Francisco city, at the beginning of the present century. Nothing could have seemed more monotonous, more grimy, less interesting, to the outsider’s eye at least, than life as it presented itself to the twelve women who were employed in bookkeeping there. Yet, being young, as they all were, each of these girls was an adventuress, in a quiet way, and each one dreamed bright dreams in the dreary place, and waited, as youth must wait, for fortune, or fame, or position, love or power, to evolve itself somehow from the dulness of her days, and give her the key that should open-and shut-the doors of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter’s offices to her forever.