Muriel stood being grilled about the junior Armours’ gathering musical skills. What were the odds against a possible concert career for one if not two of them? The practical truth ran counter to Miss Fraser’s own best interest. And yet her standards would permit no outright lie. As Muriel recounted small if building victories in keyboard competence, she studied Sophy Armour’s Ruskin. The great man had been a Fraser family acquaintance, after all; and Muriel adjudged this edition thicker than the inscribed copy her papa still refused to sell. A butler summoned Mrs. Armour: some visiting Parisian decorator needed a consultation as to the proper citrus yellow for an impending sorbet of a Yellow Room. The florid lady rose, wedged her book into a little Louis XV glass-fronted case, and, in rustling past Miss Fraser, gave one stern daring glance that piqued the teacher’s interest.

Only a person this disciplined at intellectual curiosity, only someone with very good hearing—lest Mrs. Armour return—only someone ruddered by a certain wily nerve, would have risked padding over as Muriel did now. Unfastening the case, she lifted Ruskin. Out of him fell a brown paperbound “novelette.”

“The Upstairs Maid’s Impractical Heart;
or, A Cautionary Confession”

Muriel, biting her own lip with nearly sick-making pleasure, felt shamed at how much sly and racing joy she felt. Odd to picture suddenly a dun hen’s wing beating, odd to picture cattle staring from a slow train toward the skyline of Chicago, maybe taking that distant form as some mountain suitable for grazing. All while Miss Fraser’s right forefinger—tapered, nearly aristocratic from being so long for hire—skimmed a sample page:

My window-cleaning requiring my mounting the library ladder was now interrupted, as I posed helpless above him. His bedampened lips, then the bristle moustache of the devilishly handsome young master pressed, violent as a bee sting, then melting as bee honey, against my left knee and, no, please, oh up suddenly beneath the confines of my best white apron. What to do? Just one room away, his mother dictated bread ’n’ butter notes. A regretted yet flooding warmth suffused, then seized me with its wanton hypnotism, just where HE did, between my own strong working-girl’s legs. “Please, sir, stop, for the sake of my employment, for the sake of all that’s … oh, ooh, sir …”

Miss Fraser replaced the book(s) exactly, then negotiated many hallways; exiting through a hotel-sized kitchen, she snagged today’s coin. On her long walk home she wondered, might she have mentioned once playing two John Field nocturnes for Mr. Ruskin himself? He had been not uncomplimentary. The great man’s admonition had been to “see,” then plainly to “say.” But this edict did not include the gloating irony of having seen happily more than certain others; such comparisons were odious, undignified. The temptation to feel superior toward one’s employer was really too demeaning. And yet Muriel, during the three-mile hike toward home, her carpetbag swinging at arm’s end like some glad schoolgirl’s, felt the lash of pleasure, of overbroad amusement and delight. History had ordained that she herself must hide a genuine association with Ruskin beneath this, her own plain wren-brown wrapper, whereas History lathed Sophy Brophy’s pulpy brownish heart in gilt, calf, sesame, and lilies.