The crossing proved stormy. Their first night out, the Fraser girls—for so they called themselves as if to stave off age—sat watching their assigned dinner companions go silent, go green, go running. A silver serving-cart on castors slid away from the waiter, and here it came rattling past, overturning gilt chairs, reeling comical as a stage drunk. Ethel’s face showed a sleepy unhappiness, and when Muriel saw her sister tasting her own mouth and swallowing too often, she said, “That kind of silliness is no’ for the likes of us. Mama has been ill enough long enough for all of us together and for good. We didn’t purchase this quite decent food in order to stay below holding on to basins, did we, dearest Ethel?” “No,” Ethel smiled, and that was all, they were fine. By the end of their rough eight-day crossing, only the Frasers appeared for meals during first sitting at their end of the second-class dining room. Waiters congratulated them and flirted with Ethel, taking Muriel, if not for her mother, then for her chaperone. Not getting seasick was what these sisters had in lieu of large tips, viable jewelry, visible social distinction. That, and their mission.

Muriel had allowed herself this single seeming vanity. Though she knew that any of her three younger sisters surpassed her in graceful appearance, she somehow refrained from inviting them to pose. Being depicted was her reward for having imagined depiction itself. Putting aside the fee for Singer Sargent, Muriel had spent nothing beyond it on new clothing to soften the all-too-factual angles of her face and figure. She deduced that Frans Hals must be a favorite of Sargent’s; she assumed that her customary clothing—black, with the cuffs and collars of white lace (even if machine-made)—would speak to Sargent’s racial memory of the Dutch masters. She knew, relentlessly, yet lightly, how she looked. And that can, at the right moment, constitute a power nigh onto the power of beauty itself. Her bearing, her pride, her self-knowledge almost scientific: these became a form of distinction visible only to those equipped to see it. (And those were all she cared to know.) Muriel had saved her coins for this one purpose and, plainly now: the painting would be, however plainly, not of Ethel, not Jenny, and not pretty baby Mabel. But, yes—of plain, pure Muriel herself.

She knew that if she achieved the distinguished thing at last, it might someday permit her family—always known as vaguely “artistic”—to perhaps claim one member as an eventual and actual artist. She half-guessed, she of the good but bold nose and shy chin, that this future kinsman might—blessed with the correct sex and the right leonine profile, buttressed by highborn female support, innocent or no—push her own great sacrifice to the Great Plains, where she most wished it, casual, to dwell: the realm of easy assumption, the freedom of his tossing off in passing, and with an air so entitled as to be but half conscious, “Oh, did I mention that my great-aunt posed for John Singer Sargent? No?” And how easily she could then imagine his bitterly pleasing, tonic little fillip, “Yes—Muriel.”