Times, Muriel wondered, was her own Scottish lineage worth her stark nunnish loyalty in preserving it? She reread Papa’s four books and knew, despite great hope, their charming limitations. Perhaps she owed her truest allegiance to the line’s more illustrious future, some chronicler to come? Her “sort,” after all, was no more than the bourgeoisie that keeps its womenfolk engaged with fireside stitchery and punch-making, its men collecting volumes of military history, supervising the yew topiaries’ progress, refortifying the garden house. Her mother’s father, though technically Lord Kilkairn, was famous, if at all, for his precocious gout, his impassioned grouse-hunting, for his touching if finally ruinous moneylending to a favorite shooting companion, the then-young Prince of Wales, eventually King Edward VII, a wag who lived far beyond the reach of any bill collection.

Muriel, bundled in scarves, clutching her carpetbag, out here in a wind that cut across a thousand miles of prairie unimpeded, stood at a railroad crosswalk studying another hundred cattle cars bringing animals to slaughter, to use. The lowing beasts, breaths smoking, gaped out at her—as if to ask her help from History, assigned. Their cuds’ white spittle still showed chopped greenery from one last home-meadow meal. And as Muriel watched another ten thousand rattle toward their predestined date with the plates of Delmonico’s, she felt herself to be the eldest heir and protector of so forthright and distinct, so pleasant and useful a tradition.

Muriel knew—with rank unsentimentality—what she herself could forevermore expect: a further succession of often lazy, always indulged students, facing the open copy of their assigned “Für Elise” and admitting, quite insolently, that they hadn’t practiced since last week, all the while daring plain Miss Muriel Fraser to find a punishment strong enough to interest them in art while remaining mild enough to prevent her being fired.

In the Armours’ kitchen, the butler paid her from a macaroon tin marked HOUSEHOLD PETTY CASH. In those days, dollars came in coins, and, having had her weekly salary flipped at her, she learned, defiant as any apple-peddling street urchin, to snag it midair with one pale, expert palm.

Every six weeks, Miss Fraser was summoned to Mrs. Armour’s boudoir reception room. Red-haired, dressed in a spillsome Empire manner, Sophy Armour reclined upon a chaise almost Pompeiian. The chamber was bone-color with green piping that reminded our reserved if irreverent Muriel of one word: spearmint. Mrs. Armour made carelessly certain that the strict-looking teacher, pointedly not invited to sit, glimpsed the title of a book she held. Golden script incised Ruskin—“Sesame and Lilies” on a leather binding crafted from one fetal calf who’d made the ultimate sacrifice for the stockyard heiress.