Reade subsequently described his feelings on receiving this letter with its bank-note.  He said: 

“I, who had been vice-president of Magdalen—­I, who flattered myself I was coming to the fore as a dramatist—­to have a five-pound note flung at my head, like a ticket for soup to a pauper, or a bone to a dog, and by an actress, too!  Yet she said my reading was admirable; and, after all, there is much virtue in a five-pound note.  Anyhow, it showed the writer had a good heart.”

The more he thought of her and of the incident, the more comforted he was.  He called on her the next day without making an appointment; and when she received him, he had the five-pound note fluttering in his hand.

She started to speak, but he interrupted her.

“No,” he said, “that is not what I wanted from you.  I wanted sympathy, and you have unintentionally supplied it.”

Then this man, whom she had regarded as half starved, presented her with an enormous bunch of hothouse grapes, and the two sat down and ate them together, thus beginning a friendship which ended only with Laura Seymour’s death.

Oddly enough, Mrs. Seymour’s suggestion that Reade should make a story of his play was a suggestion which he actually followed.  It was to her guidance and sympathy that the world owes the great novels which he afterward composed.  If he succeeded on the stage at all, it was not merely in “Masks and Faces,” but in his powerful dramatization of Zola’s novel, L’Assommoir, under the title “Drink,” in which the late Charles Warner thrilled and horrified great audiences all over the English-speaking world.  Had Reade never known Laura Seymour, he might never have written so strong a drama.

The mystery of Reade’s relations with this woman can never be definitely cleared up.  Her husband, Mr. Seymour, died not long after she and Reade became acquainted.  Then Reade and several friends, both men and women, took a house together; and Laura Seymour, now a clever manager and amiable hostess, looked after all the practical affairs of the establishment.  One by one, the others fell away, through death or by removal, until at last these two were left alone.  Then Reade, unable to give up the companionship which meant so much to him, vowed that she must still remain and care for him.  He leased a house in Sloane Street, which he has himself described in his novel A Terrible Temptation.  It is the chapter wherein Reade also draws his own portrait in the character of Francis Bolfe: 

The room was rather long, low, and nondescript; scarlet flock paper; curtains and sofas, green Utrecht velvet; woodwork and pillars, white and gold; two windows looking on the street; at the other end folding-doors, with scarcely any woodwork, all plate glass, but partly hidden by heavy curtains of the same color and material as the others.