She stood before it, studying it. A remarkable technique, watercolor: it has to be executed so swiftly, in a matter of minutes, with a very few felicitous strokes of a brush: no margin for error, for second thoughts, for blotting out and beginning again. In this case the artist captured (ah, “captured”!—how Sheila would scorn such jargon) a winter scene—early winter—pale earth colors mixed with the slightly soiled cast of the snow—trees that were of no distinctive beauty, and nearly leafless—outcroppings of rock—the ruins of an old stone building, perhaps a barn: and all that was mysterious about the painting, all that it was, seemed to have virtually nothing to do with its object, and only to do with the intensity of feeling in the artist; in the eye and the hand that had so skillfully “captured” the scene, the mood, that passing moment. So Monica stared. So Monica brooded. It was a pity, she finally decided, that she had never known the woman who had painted the watercolor—she had only known the Sheila Trask of the present, who not only detested such calendar art, as she called it, but was incapable of seeing it.

Now, art must be filtered through “mind”—whatever that means—and contaminated by it.

One Saturday in January, after the exhausting start of the new semester, it happened that Jill Starkie and her ten-year-old daughter dropped unexpectedly by Monica’s house; Jill was driving her daughter home from ballet class in Olcottsville, and couldn’t resist, as she said, paying an impromptu—“unpremeditated”—visit. She hoped Monica didn’t mind: “I always dread interrupting anyone as busy as you,” Jill said with a happy sort of apprehension, her eyes darting rapidly about as if to gather evidence of Monica’s especial busyness. “But Molly and I will only stay a minute. We promise. Won’t we, Molly?”

Monica smiled, smiled hard, and assured mother and daughter that they were very much welcome. Would they come inside, take off their coats, have something warm to drink? . . . it was so bitterly cold outside.

Within minutes sharp-eyed Jill had caught sight of the watercolor on the mantel.

“How beautiful—how exquisitely beautiful,” she said, standing before it, clasping her beringed hands together, “—so very like a Chinese landscape, yet, you know, so unmistakably American. It’s the ruins of the old poor farm, isn’t it? Just a few miles away? The artist must be local,” Jill said, squinting at the painting, “but I don’t recognize the style. Isn’t there any signature?”

Monica said, “I bought it in Olcottsville, I don’t think there is any signature.”

“Oh but surely there is, on the reverse?”

“No.”

“Have you checked?”

“Yes—of course I’ve checked.”