Long afterwards, in the same city, I saw a man sitting calmly in a fiacre, a man of the “gentlemanly” class, and ordering the cocher to drive on, although a woman was clinging to the side of the carriage and refusing to let go.  She was a strong, splendid creature of the peasant type, bareheaded, with a fine open brow, and she was obviously consumed by resentment of some injustice—­mad with it.  She was dragged along in one of the busiest streets in Paris, the little Frenchman sitting there smiling, easy.  How she escaped death I don’t know.  Then he became conscious that people were looking, and he stopped the cab and let her get in.  Oh, men!

Paris!  Paris!  Young as I was, I fell under the spell, of your elegance, your cleanness, your well-designed streets, your nonchalant gaiety.  I drank coffee at Tortoni’s.  I visited the studio of Meissonier.  I stood in the crowd that collected round Rosa Bonheur’s “Horse Fair,” which was in the Salon that year.  I grew dead sick of the endless galleries of the Louvre.  I went to the Madeleine at Easter time, all purple and white lilies, and fainted from trying to imagine ecstasy when the Host was raised....  I never fainted again in my life, except once from anger, when I heard some friends whom I loved slandering another friend whom I loved more.

Good-bye to Paris and back to London, where I began acting again with only half my heart.  I did very well, they said, as Helen in “The Hunchback,” the first part I played after my return; but I cared nothing about my success.  I was feeling wretchedly ill, and angry too, because they insisted on putting my married name on the bills.

After playing with Kate at Bristol and at the Adelphi in London, I accepted an engagement to appear in a new play by Tom Taylor, called “The Antipodes.”  It was a bad play, and I had a bad part, but Telbin’s scenery was lovely.  Telbin was a poet, and he has handed on much of his talent to his son, who is alive now, and painted most of our Faust scenery at the Lyceum—­he and dear Mr. Hawes Craven, who so loved his garden and could paint the flicker of golden sunshine for the stage better than any one.  I have always been friendly with the scene-painters, perhaps because I have always taken pains about my dresses, and consulted them beforehand about the color, so that I should not look wrong in their scenes, nor their scenes wrong with my dresses.

Telbin and Albert Moore together did up the New Queen’s Theater, Long Acre, which was opened in October, 1867, under the ostensible management of the Alfred Wigans.  I say “ostensible,” because Mr. Labouchere had something to do with it, and Miss Henrietta Hodson, whom he afterwards married, played in the burlesques and farces without which no theater bill in London at that time was complete.  The Wigans offered me an engagement, and I stayed with them until 1868, when I again left the stage.  During this engagement I acted with Charles Wyndham and Lionel Brough, and, last but not least, with Henry Irving.