gh 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.

If I had been able to look into the future, I should have been less
rebellious at the termination of my first marriage. Was I so rebellious,
after a