Wilmans began her publishing adventure living among stranger. She had no assets and no management experience, but her publishing concern made money from the start.

In her own words:

“It may not be amiss here to speak a word concerning my own experience--it often happens that the experience of another fires him who hears it to a new effort--and I want to tell how all things have conspired to push and kick and starve me into my present position of thought. “My temperament is lymphatic. I like my ease. I could amuse myself with small pleasures. I could bear much inconvenience and endure bad treatment, finding compensation in books, embroidery, and other small enjoyments.

“But it seemed as if everything I touched turned to ashes--as if nature were in conspiracy with fate to drive me on. I lost my home, where I would have been content to raise poultry for a living. I was driven into newspaper work from my very hunger.

“I was successful in this work only a few months. My ideas ripened too fast and I began, without knowing it, to write ahead of the demand made by the class of readers who took the paper I was on. Then this door shut in my face, and other doors did the same, until I stood, one sleety November day, out in the Chicago streets with twenty-five cents in my pocket, and not a soul on earth from whom I felt free to ask a dollar.

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