When he saw how the women were dressed, he suspected that they were teasing or baiting him, for Selma was all in black, and Pauline all in white. He made no comment and set them straightaway on chairs facing each other to pose for preliminary sketches. When Selma protested that they were surely not to be painted in profile, he told her that he had other reasons for placing them so, and she did not press him further.

These early sketches, for which they remained fixed at his command as he moved about, were useful in more than freeing him in his approach to the pair by showing him the lines and planes and masses their faces and bodies made. What he saw in their faces as they sat staring at each other did not appear in the sketches but showed in the finished portrait and made it a successful painting instead of merely a clever trick, although there was an element of that too, as he suspected the women had meant there to be.

He worked at them alternately after he had set up the large, stretched canvas and squeezed his colors onto a newly scraped palette board. Whoever was not sitting stayed in the room and watched him work; but Casey was used to all sorts of situations and did not mind as long as the watcher did not comment. It happened that both women were quickly sensitive to his serious application of himself to the project at hand, and the room soon took on an atmosphere of harmony and mutual respect. No one else was allowed there to observe. Casey began work in the middle of June, and July was a third over before he could look at the double portrait and declare it finished.

The flesh tones of the two women were neither white nor black, and so the final effect was far from the starkly obvious comment they had seemed to ask of him by the way they first dressed: black on white, white on black. He invented a rich background of floating flowers around both faces. The faces he kept almost clear; they were little more than colored drawings. Their expressions were not mysterious or enigmatic, but deliberately unrevealed.

The element that made the double portrait succeed as a painting was something Casey could not explain, although he had certainly intended it as he worked, and felt it first during the making of the early sketches. Neither face revealed itself by itself, but needed the other, so that a viewer’s reaction was to want to turn the picture around as he looked at it to find the second face what he had not discovered in the first.