the talk could never keep very long from Whistler. It
might be of art--question of technique, of treatment, of arrangement, of
any or all the artist's problems--and sooner or later it would be
referred to what Whistler did or did not. Or the talk might grow
reminiscent and again it was sure to return to Whistler. Not only at the
_Orientale_, but at any _cafe_ or restaurant or house or gallery where
two or three artists were gathered together, Whistler stories were
always told before the meeting broke up. It was then we first heard the
gold-fish story, and the devil-in-the-glass story, and the
Wolkoff-pastel story, and the farewell-feast story, and the innumerable
stories labelled and pigeon-holed by "the boys" for future use, and so
recently told by J. and myself in the greatest story of all--the story
of his Life--that it is too soon for me to tell them again. Up till then
I had shared the popular idea of him as a man who might be ridiculed,
abused, feared, hated, anything rather than loved. But none of the men
in Venice could speak of him without affection. "Not a bad chap,"
Jobbins would forget his weariness to say, "not half a bad chap!" and
one night he told one of the few Whistler stories never yet told in
print, except in the _Atlantic Monthly_ where this chapter was first
published.

"He rather liked me," said Jobbins, "liked to have me about, and to help
on Sundays when he showed his pastels. But that wasn't my game, you
know, and I got tired of it, and one Sunday when lots of people were
there and he asked me to bring out that drawing of a _calle_ with tall
houses, and away up above clothes hung out to dry, and a pair of
trousers in the middle, I said: 'Have you got a title for it, Whistler?'
'No,' he said. 'Well,' I said, 'call it an _Arrangement in Trousers_,'
and everybody laughed. I'd have sneaked away, for he was furious. But he
wouldn't let me, kept his eye on me, though he didn't say a word until
they'd all gone. Then he looked at me rather with that Shakespeare
fellow's _Et tu Brute_ look: 'Why, Jobbins, you, who are so amiable?'
That was all. No, not half a bad chap."

Now and then talk of Whistler and "the boys" reminded Duveneck of his
own student days, and would lead him into personal reminiscences, when
the stories were of his adventures; sometimes on Bavarian roads, singing
and fiddling his way from village to village, or in Bavarian convents,
teaching drawing to pretty novices, receiving commi