Everyone was kind to me at this time.  Friends whom I had thought would be estranged by my long absence rallied round me and welcomed me as if it were six minutes instead of six years since I had dropped out of their ken.  I was not yet a “made” woman, but I had a profitable engagement, and a delightful one, too, with Charles Reade, and I felt an enthusiasm for my work which had been wholly absent when I had returned to the stage the first time.  My children were left in the country at first, but they came up and joined me when, in the year following “The Wandering Heir,” I went to the Bancrofts at the Prince of Wales’s.  I never had the slightest fear of leaving them to their own devices, for they always knew how to amuse themselves, and were very independent and dependable in spite of their extreme youth.  I have often thanked Heaven since that, with all their faults, my boy and girl have never been lazy and never dull.  At this time Teddy always had a pencil in his hand, when he wasn’t looking for his biscuit—­he was a greedy little thing!—­and Edy was hammering clothes onto her dolls with tin-tacks!  Teddy said poetry beautifully, and when he and his sister were still tiny mites, they used to go through scene after scene of “As You Like It,” for their own amusement, not for an audience, in the wilderness at Hampton Court.  They were by no means prodigies, but it did not surprise me that my son, when he grew up, should be first a good actor, then an artist of some originality, and should finally turn all his brains and industry to new developments in the art of the theater.  My daughter has acted also—­not enough to please me, for I have a very firm belief in her talents—­and has shown again and again that she can design and make clothes for the stage that are both lovely and effective.  In all my most successful stage dresses lately she has had a hand, and if I had anything to do with a national theater, I should, without prejudice, put her in charge of the wardrobe at once!

I may be a proud parent, but I have always refrained from “pushing” my children.  They have had to fight for themselves, and to their mother their actual achievements have mattered very little.  So long as they were not lazy, I have always felt that I could forgive them anything!

And now Teddy and Edy—­Teddy in a minute white pique suit, and Edy in a tiny kimono, in which she looked as Japanese as everything which surrounded her—­disappear from these pages for quite a long time.  But all this time, you must understand, they are educating their mother!

Charles Reade, having brought me back to the stage, and being my manager into the bargain, was deeply concerned about my progress as an actress.  During the run of “The Wandering Heir” he used to sit in a private box every night to watch the play, and would send me round notes between the acts, telling me what I had done ill and what well in the preceding act.  Dear, kind, unjust, generous, cautious, impulsive,