I was not twenty-one when I left the stage for the second time, and I haven’t made up my mind yet whether it was good or bad for me, as an actress, to cease from practicing my craft for six years.  Talma, the great French actor, recommends long spells of rest, and says that “perpetual indulgence in the excitement of impersonation dulls the sympathy and impairs the imaginative faculty of the comedian.”  This is very useful in my defense, yet I could find many examples which prove the contrary.  I could never imagine Henry Irving leaving the stage for six months, let alone six years, and I don’t think it would have been of the slightest benefit to him.  But he had not been on the stage as a child.

If I was able to rest so long without rusting, it was, I am sure, because I had been thoroughly trained in the technique of acting long before I reached my twentieth year—­an age at which most students are just beginning to wrestle with elementary principles.

Of course, I did not argue in this way at the time!  As I have said, I had no intention of ever acting again when I left the Queen’s Theater.  If it is the mark of the artist to love art before everything, to renounce everything for its sake, to think all the sweet human things of life well lost if only he may attain something, do some good, great work—­then I was never an artist.  I have been happiest in my work when I was working for some one else.  I admire those impersonal people who care for nothing outside their own ambition, yet I detest them at the same time, and I have the simplest faith that absolute devotion to another human being means the greatest happiness.  That happiness was now mine.

I led a most unconventional life, and experienced exquisite delight from the mere fact of being in the country.  No one knows what “the country” means until he or she has lived in it.  “Then, if ever, come perfect days.”

What a sensation it was, too, to be untrammeled by time!  Actors must take care of themselves and their voices, husband their strength for the evening work, and when it is over they are too tired to do anything!  For the first time I was able to put all my energies into living.  Charles Lamb says, I think, that when he left the East India House, he felt embarrassed by the vast estates of time at his disposal, and wished that he had a bailiff to manage them for him, but I knew no such embarrassment.

I began gardening, “the purest of human pleasures”; I learned to cook, and in time cooked very well, though my first essay in that difficult art was rewarded with dire and complete failure.

It was a chicken!  Now, as all the chickens had names—­Sultan, Duke, Lord Tom Noddy, Lady Teazle, and so forth—­and as I was very proud of them as living birds, it was a great wrench to kill one at all, to start with.  It was the murder of Sultan, not the killing of a chicken.  However, at last it was done, and Sultan deprived of his feathers, floured, and trussed.  I had no idea how this was all done, but I tried to make him “sit up” nicely like the chickens in the shops.