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 all? I am afraid I _showed_ about as much rebellion as a sheep.
But I was miserable, indignant, unable to understand that there could be
any justice in what had happened. In a little more than two years I
returned to the stage. I was practically _driven_ back by those who
meant to be kind--Tom Taylor, my father and mother, and others. _They_
looked ahead and saw clearly it was for my good.

It _was_ a good thing, but at the time I hated it. And I hated going
back to live at home. Mother furnished a room for me, and I thought the
furniture hideous. Poor mother!

For years Beethoven always reminded me of mending stockings, because I
used to struggle with the large holes in my brothers' stockings upstairs