But it was the bawd’s cloth violets Muriel found most amusing, then arresting. Flowers were moved several times about the jacket, now tucked behind one big ear, then withdrawn with a shy laugh. Pressed to left shoulder, lower, no, up. False leaves showed a bitter green—blossoms, the correct velvety purple. Once the posy was safety-pinned to just the right spot, the whore tried freshening it a bit. At best, this nosegay had been a ten-cent ornament. Now it was stiffened and dirty, moistened by drizzle under sundry street-lamps. As voices of workingmen boomed nearby, her fussing with the violets grew more frantic. Hundreds of potential clients were getting past. First the prostitute squeezed flowers, one hand primping, tickling in a manner most encouraging. Her attempts to communicate beauty to this lifeless sprig of wire and gauze became—for Muriel—first familiar, then spirited, finally endearing. It made Miss Fraser believe that, once this woman touched some man’s coat sleeve, she could convince him of anything; could even transcend her overadvertising. For what might one say to some hefty office manager who’d paid hard cash for handling ample breasts? Could such artless padding be made to seem but a flirtation, some courtesan’s high art? The violets resisted; so now the young lady bent over her own chest. Rough hands cupped around the purple and—with a force of hope that caused the watchful Miss Fraser to emit a low involuntary groan—the girl huffed. She breathed into such shelter as her red hands made, hoping to plump the lifeless flowers. She stood there, flexed forward, consulting the mirror, but, no, the things just drooped. So—a realist—the woman struck the mirror one halfhearted blow, then pushed violets back into her deep black purse. She straightened her hem and turned toward the street’s ninety thousand men in ninety thousand suits as black as hers. She turned just as Muriel rushed off, not daring to be seen, not knowing how to hide the look—whatever it be—haunting her own stricken face.

Chicago, drawing its countless mules and cows and hogs and chickens, constituted a kind of glamorous death-wish. Miss Fraser, darting through the crowds, pleased at all the blank and hatted bustle, wondered: What herding sadness had lured her father here, in quest of what? His own Buffalo Bill–ness? Some forty-five-year-old’s last chance at being wild? To come clear here from Glasgow. But, if Miss Fraser had ever wavered in her resolve to go ahead, risk everything on having a picture made—her picture made—then those three minutes changed that. Her watching the artifice of a plain smart woman seeking to improve herself—that woman, fighting with her every trick and frippery, with all her wiles and animal instincts, to appear necessary for some one man tonight—this helped Muriel understand afresh: how impossible the beautiful gesture in a world so commercial, grinding, dimmed. Walking home very fast, she felt yet more determined. Slung between odd emotional half-tones, not laughter yet not quite a scream. These swings seemed to resemble those huge masklike grimaces that underwrite a little lipstick’s practiced application.