"Now it's finished!" he exclaimed. "Now you may look at it."

Forgetting his umbrella, the foreign gentleman called at the studio
the next day to get it. Whistler was out, but the visitor was much
moved to find the "finishing touch" had been carefully wiped off!

* * * * *

Mr. Keppel's personal relations with Whistler ended when, by an idle
chance, he sent a copy of _The University of the State of New York
Bulletin, Bibliography, No. I, a Guide to the Study of James Abbott
McNeill Whistler_, compiled by Walter Greenwood Forsyth and Joseph Le
Roy Harrison, to Joseph Pennell, and another to Ernest Brown, in
London. Mr. Keppel, arriving in London the day of Mrs. Whistler's
funeral, sent a note of condolence, and, receiving a mourning envelope
sealed with a black butterfly, opened it expecting a grateful
acknowledgment. Instead, it was a fierce, rasping denunciation for the
distribution of the pamphlet--a mere catalogue so far as it went.

"I must not let the occasion of your being in town pass," he wrote,
"without acknowledging the gratuitous zeal with which you have done
your best to further the circulation of one of the most malignant
innuendos, in the way of scurrilous half-assertions, it has been my
fate hitherto to meet. Mr. Brown very properly sent on to me the
pamphlet you had promptly posted to him. Mr. Pennell, also, I find,
you had carefully supplied with a copy--and I have no doubt that, with
the untiring energy of the 'busy' one, you have smartly placed the
pretty work in the hands of many another before this."

* * * * *