It took Muriel’s fullest concentration to rattle out her tale while arriving in the mammoth studio—the three easels, the Steinway concert grand, the upended mahogany-and-ebony steamer trunk with its heavy bouquet of peonies. The room revealed a wealth of reflecting surfaces wherein it was impossible to know which detail was painted and which actual, and which, actually, both.

Yes, backstage at a Paderewski concert, it seems the pouter-pigeon Mrs. Armour invited the great musician to play at “my mansion,” after dinner the following evening. In plain hearing of everyone, she asked what his fee would be. “Fifteen thousand dollars, forty minutes’ music of my choosing.” “That in itself,” she replied, “will present no difficulty. But I feel I must needs warn you to use the staff entrance and that, after playing, I will not sanction your speaking to, or in any way mingling with, my distinguished guests.” “Ahh,” he smiled, “in that case, madam, TEN thousand dollars.”

The painter, chuckling, asked Muriel to repeat the precise phrasing. Seeing he planned to use it, she felt she’d already been, in some small manner, portrayed by him. To be useful: that was all Muriel had ever wanted. To practice your lifetime’s Czerny lessons but for the sake of a final performance, not more mere practice. To be of such thorough Use made you so richly mortal that your spirit residue remained, luminous, of continual compasslike use to others. Art gave your poor life the ultimate utility. Muriel Fraser did not teach Armours; Music taught itself through her. Yet, having arrived here, having determined a way to accomplish both eternal use and eternal pleasure—how, now, to ask?

She did not mention having learned through intermediaries that watercolor portraits, though rarely done, could be had for less than $350, while oils began at upwards of $800 to $1,200. In the wall safe at the Lygon Arms, Muriel had left her best jet-beaded reticule. It now contained but $600, and yet from that sum she and her sister must return to Southampton and then take the long train ride from New York to boomtown Chicago.

“I’d begun a little watercolor, just to get my hand in again,” and he gestured down at the broad white page marked with traces of those pink flowers set on the upmost end of the sleek trunk just opposite. Muriel decided against stepping over too suddenly. And now, having achieved his studio—her dowry long since spent to get here, her life savings dwindling fast—Muriel found that, the more familiar and relaxed she felt with the great painter, the less likely it became that she might state just why she’d come. “Yes,” he said, leaning on the table where the watercolor rested, “I believe Mrs. Armour is the first I painted among a group there known to some, I am told, as ‘the meat people,’” and he gave a grin as non-committal as a grin can be. Muriel recalled the portrait itself, remarking inwardly that he’d at least paid Mrs. Sophy Brophy Armour the compliment of elongation.