The artist mentioned how glad he was to be in the Cotswolds again, how he regretted having to rush off the very next morning. And Muriel paused in patrolling the studio; she felt her sister’s eyes upon her. “Is it customary”—Ethel herself intended to try something—“for you to accept appointments from those who might wish to ‘sit to you’ for a portrait?”

“Months and years in advance. ‘Doing mugs,’ I call it in the slang. I should soon like to get beyond that….”

He seemed to dare Muriel to state her history as wished, not assigned. The fabled Seeing would be hers; but perhaps, she now saw, the Telling of the vision was not to be….

In order to save a few pence, she had not eaten lunch, believing this might further enhance her pallor. Now Muriel regretted that. She felt dizzied at being so near her hope and yet finding herself too unlike the Sophy Brophys of this world to just come out with it. Ethel, stricken, kept staring at the older sister, bobbing her head in a manner touching if a bit grotesque, as if to say, “Go ahead. Ask now.”

“Mrs. Armour”—Muriel held fire—“at least has the distinction of having been set down by you. Tomorrow you leave?” He absently nodded, staring at the floppy peonies and the highly polished trunk that reflected flowers’ glowing aura; and, taking up a brush, he dispersed the slightest wash and soon seemed utterly lost to mere conversation. Did the Fraser girls distract him from his work or inspire him to go on with it? He was not much noticing them. He had two thousand visitors a year.

Outside the immense window, Muriel noted one yellowed leaf fall from an elm, spiraling to the lawn, its descent modest, perfect, final. There came the childhood memory of one brown hen’s translucent wing beating beneath a door’s black rubber blade, murdered by a glazed entrance that seemed welcoming but was, being mirror, only the sky disguised. And all at once the impossibility of her mission broke upon her. She saw that precisely what gave her more inward stature than the meat people was just what would prevent her coming out with it, asking him to “do” her, “save” her, even for a fee. Even if she’d somehow assembled the correct secret amount. A wing-whipped lightness set to roaring in her ears. Trembling seized her calves, both knees locked, but instead of her feeling stricken, an unearthly clarity settled. Some flooding white intelligence claimed her. “So,” was her thought. Finally—Muriel Fraser had proven to herself (yet only to herself) her possession of it, of the distinguished thing, at last. And this very distinction prevented her naming that which she most wanted, wanted for reasons too urgent to state, for motives far beyond mere personal vanity, from an impulse as steadying and noble as any she’d encountered on a five-line musical staff or occupying any carved gilt frame. It would only come to pass in her imagination. But THERE it had been seen, then plainly stated, and therefore it was true, forever.