But he had even in this respect his little human weaknesses, and the praise which I had bestowed upon his work on more than one occasion brought from him a warm letter of appreciation, the existence of which I think he afterwards forgot; for I remember at a dinner-party, during the later days of our friendship, when he was denouncing, with his accustomed liberty of speech, that hated tribe of which I had been a member, I ventured softly from the other end of the table to interject the remark, “Ah yes, Jimmy, but you didn’t always think so,” and then upon the top of a reiterated expression of his contempt for those who wrote about Art, I reminded him of my possession of a little letter which I had been very happy to receive and was well content to preserve. And so the incident closed with some graceful and half-jesting reference on his part to my superior claims, which he had always, of course, as he declared, impliedly excepted from his general condemnation of the class. As a companion I found him delightful, and his hospitality at the several houses he successively occupied in Chelsea, however restricted it might occasionally prove owing to his shifting financial fortunes, had an inimitable grace and distinction peculiarly his own; though there were some, however, whose more exacting appetite was not always content with the slender material of those delightful little breakfasts over which he so perfectly presided. To me the charm of the host sufficed to cover any deficiency in the feast, even in those days when he laughingly told me that his fishmonger was the only tradesman who could afford to deal with him. But I remember meeting, during one of these periods of narrow resources, a foreign painter who at one time had felt himself greatly favoured by an invitation to Cheyne Walk. I asked him if he had seen anything of Whistler lately, to which he replied, “Ah no, not now so much. He ask me a leetle while ago to breakfarst, and I go. My cab-fare two shilling, ’arf-crown. I arrive, very nice. Gold fish in bowl, very pretty. But breakfarst--one egg, one toast, no more! Ah no! My cab-fare, two shilling, ’arf-crown. For me no more!” This, I think, was an exaggerated picture of the limits which Whistler was sometimes compelled to set to his hospitality. I know, for my own part at any rate, that these breakfasts were always delightful, and sometimes, when the mood took him, he would go himself into the kitchen and prepare a “plat” of his own devising, thus giving a final charm to his graceful entertainments. His talk on these occasions, swift in its wit and always ready in repartee, was not, however, often of a kind that bears recording, so much depended upon the man himself, his personality and his manner, and so much upon the exact appropriateness of every word he uttered to the mood of the occasion. There was always about him a substratum of impish mischief which gave flavour and colour either to his criticism or his appreciation.