I do not know what they had been doing. Had they been unpacking china and linen and chairs, while the maid foraged the neighbouring shops? Had an unpremeditated feast produced itself by Jimmie's conjuring? Had Jimmie cooked the dinner while Mrs. Whistler arranged the table with its dainty ware, and silver, and soft linen, and shaded lights? Or had they reversed the parts? I shall never know. But there was the daintiest, most delicious dinner, most charmingly served, and there were two or three kindly wines, a coffee that the master himself had prepared, and a soothing _liqueur_ from his beloved Paris. It was a dinner that more than reconciled one to perishing on a packing case. And through it all Whistler summed up his philosophy of life and art, as previously and subsequently he had set it forth elsewhere. We sat till long after midnight in high session, debating selections from press clippings which had been showered upon him by his "excellent Romeike." "Shall I put in this, or omit that? Here 's something too good to lose!" And so, with what he called "infinite jerriment", another portion of "The Gentle Art" began to take shape. In its further progress I had no hand, as I was off to America in a day or two, and Jimmie needed no aid in goading his solicitors to the pursuit of Sheridan Ford who had, Whistler {161} said, infringed his literary rights. The pursuit of Sheridan was an epic which aroused more than nine days' wonder; it led from London to Antwerp, from Antwerp to Paris, from Paris to New York and back to London again. The "Extraordinary Piratical Plot" was defeated, the "piratical edition" was suppressed, and, in the early summer of 1890, there appeared, published by the graceful, sympathetic, and cordial aid of Mr. William Heinemann _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies as Pleasingly Exemplified in Many Instances, Wherein the Serious Ones of this Earth, Carefully Exasperated, Have Been Prettily Spurred On to Unseemliness and Indiscretion, While Overcome by an Undue Sense of Right_. The dedication was no less characteristic: "To the rare Few, who, early in Life, have rid Themselves of the Friendship of the Many, these pathetic Papers are inscribed."