Moreover, certain poisons, of which hashish is the best known, derange the central nervous system into a condition of supersensitiveness, in which the person poisoned feels himself inundated with floods of light, and sees a blinding brightness everywhere. The sensitiveness to which only illness or poison raises the average brain, was from nature the peculiarity of Whistler’s sight-centres. He was conscious that in certain respects he had more than others, and he felt as superior to them as the Indian hunter does to a pale face of the towns on a game-beast’s track, which the latter does not notice at all, whilst it gives the former a thousand clear indications. As an artist he was amiably modest, as a man amusingly arrogant. He did not flatter himself on his work, but on his finer organisation, _i.e._, that he was kneaded out of better dough than the majority. His supersensitiveness is expressed not only in his revel of colour; it is also curiously and graphically revealed in the impressions which he feels of the appearance of women, and which he conveys in his best portraits of women with an intensity no longer restrained within physiological bounds, but positively touching on the morbid. The intensity with which he feels young, high-bred, nervous women has quite an uncanny effect on me. I think of his “Lady Meux,” and other capricious femininities, which were exhibited, in the last fifteen years, in the Paris _salons_ and in London. He plants his model before us in some wonderful position. One stands with its back towards us, but turns its head, as if in a sudden caprice, to us. Another shows us its full face, and looks fascinatingly at us with pinched mouth and impenetrable eyes that think troublous thoughts. These perverted, whimsical beauties wear remarkable and personal toilettes which, except the face and often the hands, reveal not a finger’s breadth of skin, yet, in spite of the interposition of silk and lace, cry out for the fig leaf. They are bundles of sick nerves that, from the crowns of their heads to the tips of their fingers, seem to thrill with Sadic excitement. It is as though they wanted to entice men to wild attempts, and at the same time held their claws ready to tear, with a loud cry of pleasure, the flesh of the daring ones. Everything madly Mænadic, or inexorably Sphinx-like, that Ibsen was incapable of incarnating convincingly in his Hedda Gabler speaks distinctly from Whistler’s female portraits.