Miss Hetherington sniffed. “Then she must indeed be talented. It is said that he has a poor opinion of women painters. He is of the old school—that women belong in the home, raising children. Such an outdated notion, as I used to tell my students. I used to say ‘I am educating you to be more than a beautiful adornment to your husband. I am teaching you to think for yourselves and to believe that the whole world is open to you.’”

“Quite right,” Miss Pinkerton said. “I told my students the same thing. But it was usually the same outcome. They left our establishment determined to become doctors and writers and explorers and six months later they were engaged to some vacuous young man and considered themselves happy and blessed.”

“If only it were possible to be happily married and have a career,” one of the widows said and sighed.

“Of course it’s not. How can it ever be possible,” the other widow snapped. “Unless one is Madame Curie.”

I stayed silent.

“Speaking of the young girl in the Reynold Bryce paintings,” the other spinster, a Miss Schmitt, joined in the conversation for the first time, “wasn’t there some kind of scandal or rumor about her?”

They turned to Miss Hetherington, the resident expert. She nodded and leaned closer to us, lowering her voice and looking around before speaking. “I gather, although this has not been confirmed, that she is shut away, of unsound mind.”

“Shut away? In an institution, you mean?”

Miss Hetherington shook her head. “No, I understand that she is cared for at home. I am told, on good authority by someone who knew the family in Boston, that she was always a little—shall we say—strange—remote, unworldly. The person who told me said that she couldn’t put a finger on it but there was something not quite right about her. Well, one saw it in the paintings, didn’t one? As if she wasn’t quite of this world. Angelic, almost. That’s why he called her Angela, of course. I believe her real name was something quite different. However one gathers that she had some kind of brainstorm or mental collapse and now is a pathetic creature of strange fits and fantasies who needs constant care.”

“How terribly sad,” I said, thinking that the face that had looked out to sea in that painting had been full of hope and interest for what lay over the horizon.

“That must have been the reason that Bryce stopped painting her,” one of the widows said. “She was sliding into madness and her face no longer had that luminous angelic quality.”

“One gathers he was very generous to the family,” Miss Hetherington said. “Of course he was born to money. That’s how he funded his painting for many years until he made a name for himself. The Bryces are an old Bostonian family, you know.”