“How very nice you look in the daytime,” he said.  “Not like an actress!”

I disclaimed my singularity, and said I thought actresses looked very nice in the daytime.

To him and to the others my early romance was always the most interesting thing about me.  When I saw them in later times, it seemed as if months, not years, had passed since I was Nelly Watts.

Once, at the dictates of a conscience perhaps over fastidious, I made a bonfire of my letters.  But a few were saved from the burning, more by accident than design.  Among them I found yesterday a kind little note from Sir William Vernon Harcourt, which shows me that I must have known him, too, at the time of my first marriage and met him later on when I returned to the stage.

“You cannot tell how much pleased I am to hear that you have been as happy as you deserve to be.  The longer one lives, the more one learns not to despair, and to believe that nothing is impossible to those who have courage and hope and youth—­I was going to add beauty and genius.” (This is the sort of thing that made me blush—­and burn my letters before they shamed me!)

     “My little boy is still the charm and consolation of my life.  He is
     now twelve years old, and though I say it that should not, is a
     perfect child, and wins the hearts of all who know him.”

That little boy, now in His Majesty’s Government, is known as the Right Honorable Lewis Harcourt.  He married an American lady, Miss Burns of New York.

Many inaccurate stories have been told of my brief married life, and I have never contradicted them—­they were so manifestly absurd.  Those who can imagine the surroundings into which I, a raw girl, undeveloped in all except my training as an actress, was thrown, can imagine the situation.

Of one thing I am certain.  While I was with Signor—­the name by which Mr. Watts was known among his friends—­I never had one single pang of regret for the theater.  This may do me no credit, but it is true.

I wondered at the new life, and worshiped it because of its beauty.  When it suddenly came to an end, I was thunderstruck; and refused at first to consent to the separation, which was arranged for me in much the same way as my marriage had been.

The whole thing was managed by those kind friends whose chief business in life seems to be the care of others.  I don’t blame them.  There are cases where no one is to blame.  “There do exist such things as honest misunderstandings,” as Charles Reade was always impressing on me at a later time.  There were no vulgar accusations on either side, and the words I read in the deed of separation, “incompatibility of temper”—­a mere legal phrase—­more than covered the ground.  Truer still would have been “incompatibility of occupation,” and the interference of well-meaning friends.  We all suffer from that sort of thing.  Pray God one be not a well-meaning friend one’s self!