le to, and when the talks were by
day instead--not quite the same in the last, the saddest months of all,
for weakness and thoughts of the work yet to be done and the feebleness
that kept him from doing it fell like a black cloud over all our
meetings, even those where the old gaiety asserted itself for a moment
and the old light of battle gleamed again in his eyes. To the end he
liked the talk no less than we, for to the end he sent for us, to the
end he would see us when few besides were admitted. There, for those who
would like to question his friendship with us, for those who believe
that Whistler never could keep a friend because he never wanted to, is
the proof dear to us of the good friend he could be when his friendship
was not abused or taken advantage of behind his back.

Many other nights besides there have been--long series of American
nights--John Van Dyke nights I might say, Timothy Cole nights,--but no,
I am not going to name names and make a catalogue, I am not going to
write their story, I am not going to run the risks of the folly I have
protested against. I have confessed my safe belief that of the living
only good should be spoken, and good only when it is within the bounds
of discretion. It is not my ambition to rival at home the unpopularity
of N.P. Willis in England after the first of his indiscretions, which
seem discretion itself now in the light of to-day's yellow and society
journalism.

And there have been English nights--many--nights with old friends who
are faithful and new friends who are devoted--nights of late so like the
old Thursday nights that both Hartrick and Sullivan, now twenty years
older and with no Phil May to revolve round, asked why those old
memorable gay nights could not be revived? But would they be gay? Would
they not turn out the dust and ashes, the worse than Lenten fare, from
which I shrink? Would they not, as I have said, prove as mournful as
that banquet of Zola's Conquerors of Paris?

Recently there have been Belgian nights--nights with those Belgian
artists whose habit was never to travel at all until they started on
their journey as exiles to London--a journey to which the end in a
return journey seems to them so tediously long in coming. And there have
been War nights when the clash of our battle, in the grim consciousness
of that other battle not so far away, is less cheerful. And there have
been nights with the great search-lights over the Thames that tell us