“The marriage was not a happy one,” they will probably say after my death, and I forestall them by saying that it in many ways was very happy indeed.  What bitterness there was effaced itself in a very remarkable way.

I saw Mr. Watts but once face to face after the separation.  We met in the street at Brighton, and he told me that I had grown!  I was never to speak to him again.  But years later, after I had appeared at the Lyceum and had made some success in the world, I was in the garden of a house which adjoined Mr. Watt’s new Little Holland House, and he, in his garden, saw me through the hedge.  It was then that I received from him the first letter that I had had for years.  In this letter he told me that he had watched my success with eager interest, and asked me to shake hands with him in spirit.  “What success I may have,” he wrote, “will be very incomplete and unsatisfactory if you cannot do what I have long been hesitating to ask.  If you cannot, keep silence.  If you can, one word, ‘Yes,’ will be enough.”

I answered simply, “Yes.”

After that he wrote to me again, and for two or three years we corresponded, but I never came into personal contact with him.

As the past is now to me like a story in a book that I once read, I can speak of it easily.  But if by doing so I thought that I might give pain or embarrassment to any one else, I should be silent about this long-forgotten time.  After careful consideration it does not seem to me that it can be either indiscreet or injurious to let it be known that this great artist honored and appreciated my efforts and strife in my art; that this great man could not rid himself of the pain of feeling that he “had spoiled my life” (a chivalrous assumption of blame for what was, I think, a natural, almost inevitable, catastrophe), and that long after all personal relation had been broken off, he wrote to me gently, kindly,—­as sympathetically ignoring the strangeness of the position, as if, to use his own expression, “we stood face to face on the brink of an universal grave.”

When this tender kindness was established between us, he sent me a portrait-head that he had done of me when I was his wife.  I think it a very beautiful picture.  He did not touch it except to mend the edges, thinking it better not to try to improve it by the work of another time.

In one of these letters he writes that “there is nothing in all this that the world might not know.”  Surely the world is always the better for having a little truth instead of a great deal of idle inaccuracy and falsehood.  That is my justification for publishing this, if justification be needed.

If I did not fulfill his too high prophecy that “in addition to your artistic eminence, I feel that you will achieve a solid social position, make yourself a great woman, and take a noble place in the history of your time,” I was the better for his having made it.