“Have there been many great men artists?” he enquired, with a little twinkle; “because I think not. In fact, there has been just as good work done by women as has ever been done by men in that line, and now that more of them are taking up Art, and are breaking the trammels by which they have been surrounded for generations, I shall be surprised if the world does not produce better women artists than men. It is in them; it is a born instinct. Love of refinement, beauty, poetry, sentiment, and colour belong to woman. Cruelty, perhaps valour, strength, and ruggedness, are on the man’s side.” Encouragement goes a long way, just as human sympathy is the very backbone of life. Poor Jimmy Whistler got very little of either until his last few years. To the philosophy of youth everything matters, to the maturity of old age nothing matters. He was brilliant and vain. But then, all men are vain. It is the prerogative of the male from the peacock upwards. For some years Whistler had a little Neapolitan model, with very dark hair and beautiful black eyes. His wife took great interest in her. After his bereavement Jimmy felt he ought to continue to minister to the welfare of the girl, who by this time had grown into a magnificent specimen of a Neapolitan woman. She married when still very young, and, being tired of sitting as a model, she asked her patron one day to allow her to use his name if she started an atelier. “Might it be called the ‘Whistler Studio,’ and would he himself come and see after it and give instruction once a week?” Whistler approved of the plan and assented. The woman therefore took a studio in Paris, where the painter was living, and at the end of the month, instead of having a dozen students as she expected, something like a hundred had entered their names, all eager to study under Whistler. On the strength of her success Madame abandoned her simple clothes and appeared gorgeous in black, rustling silk robes, in which she strutted about the studio and played the _grande dame_. Whistler, as has been said, promised to attend, and more or less he kept his word. The first day of his appearance the great little man marched into the room occupied by the female students, and, picking out one girl, sat down opposite her canvas, intending to correct her work. “Give me your palette,” he said. “What is this? and this? and this?” She told him the different colours. “Hideous!” he replied, “and impossible! Where are so and so, and this and that?” She had none of them. No one in the room was lucky enough to possess the colours he sought, so Whistler sent out for them and chatted pleasantly until the messenger’s return, having told the maiden in the meantime to clean her palette of all the vivid hues she had displayed upon it. The paints and the clean palette arrived together. Jimmy arranged them according to his taste.