call 'strong.' When a picture 'smells of paint,'" he said slowly,
"it's what they call 'strong.'"

* * * * *

Riding once with Starr to dine at the Café Royal, Whistler leaned
forward in the hansom and looked at the green park in the dusk, fresh
and sweet after the rain; at the long line of light reflected,
shimmering, in the wet Piccadilly pavement, and said:

"Starr, I have not dined, as you know, so you need not think I say
this in anything but a cold and careful spirit: it is better to live
on bread and cheese and paint beautiful things than to live like Dives
and paint pot-boilers. But a painter really should not have to worry
about--'various,' you know. Poverty may induce industry, but it does
not produce the fine flower of painting. The test is not poverty; it's
money. Give a painter money and see what he'll do. If he does not
paint, his work is well lost to the world. If I had had, say, three
thousand pounds a year, what beautiful things I could have done!"

* * * * *

Before the portrait of little Miss Alexander went to the Grosvenor
Gallery, Tom Taylor, the art-critic of the _Times_, called at the
studio to see it. "Ah, yes--'um," he remarked, and added that an
upright line in the paneling of the wall was wrong and that the
picture would be better without it, adding, "Of course, it's a matter
of taste."

To which Whistler rejoined: "I thought that perhaps for once you were