Wilde had but a short respite from the trouble of keeping up a reputation and an income. The American dollars were soon spent, and he had to bring to an end his Balzacian industry, and the delightful business of being a poet in Paris. He returned to London, where he took rooms in Charles Street, Haymarket. He had to earn a livelihood, and poverty and his own extravagance compelled him to do that which he most disliked, to take up again a pose whose fascination he had exhausted. He signed an agreement with a lecture agency, and toured through the English provinces, repeating, as cheerfully as he could, the lectures he had given in America. NOTE ON WILDE AND WHISTLER Both before and after his American lecturing tour Wilde was one of the frequenters of Whistler's studio in Chelsea. He had an unbounded admiration for this painter, whose conversation was no less vivid than his work, and Whistler's attitude towards him was not so cavalier as that he adopted to others among his admirers. Wilde, in spite of his youth, had a reputation, and shared with Whistler the applause of any company in which they were together. In 1883, when Wilde was to lecture to the Academy Students, he asked Whistler what he should say to them. Whistler sketched a lecture for him, and Wilde used parts of it with success and repaid him by a tremendous compliment. Two years later Whistler himself lectured, and, for his "Ten O'Clock," re-appropriated some of the material he had suggested to his friend. That is the origin of the accusation, so often made, that Wilde built a reputation on borrowed bons mots. In the "Ten O'Clock," Whistler, annoyed by Wilde's lecturing on art, as he would have been by the lecturing of any other man who was not himself a painter, held a veiled figure of him up to ridicule, and threw a stone from a frail house in jeering at his knee-breeches. "Costume is not dress. And the wearers of wardrobes may not be doctors of taste ..." Wilde smilingly replied. Whistler feinted. Wilde parried. Whistler thrust:--"What has Oscar in common with Art except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding that he peddles in the provinces? Oscar--the amiable, irresponsible, esurient Oscar--with no more sense of a picture than he has of the fit of a coat--has the courage of the opinions ... of others!" Wilde answered that "with our James vulgarity begins at home and should be allowed to stay there," and with that their friendship was buried, like the hatchet, "in the side of the enemy." Two years later, Wilde, with an indifference amusing in any case and delightful if it was conscious, roused further protest by using in "The Decay of Lying" the phrase, "the courage of the opinions of others," that had been the sting of Whistler's reproach.