Maestro liked to talk, during. Deft, half absently, he applied water paint. The Italian activated a phonograph with a bugle like a mammoth celluloid morning glory. Mixing bowls dripping with dried pigment occupied a sleigh-shaped daybed parked in one swagged corner of the glassy room. Behind a door loomed one headless mannequin wearing a dress beaded in a poisonous green, the costume in which Ellen Terry had been painted by the master, setting a crown upon her own head, in her role of Lady Macbeth. Maestro took up the theme of churches. He recommended ones in the neighborhood worth visiting and then ranged farther afield, mentioning hideous overrestorations of otherwise perfect a capella jewels in his adored Tuscany.

As he spoke with fluency of his brush technique, he squeezed conversational dots of tubed watercolor paint upon a white glass to his right, blending these easily as he recombined casual spoken topics. The Italian appeared and disappeared, bearing clean white rags and bearing carafes of clear water. These he arranged and dispensed around the man in banker’s clothes, the servant performing his sacramental duties with an acolyte’s half-bored, half-awed matter-of-factness. By means of frequent recranking, he kept the tenor aria endlessly repeating. The late daylight seemed to coat the studio’s carved chairs, brass helmets, the Chinese screen backing one mammoth bouquet of disintegrating peonies set atop the handsome trunk. The chamber turned a tint now pink, now gold, soon both at once.

Just as my great-aunt understood she could not ask; just as she understood that seven years’ savings, the daily plan, the apples had been in the service of practice, not performance, of getting here, not getting painted; just as she halted, giddied, alongside the trunk that Sargent idly if intently painted—just as she most wished she’d eaten both lunch and breakfast, as she stood wondering if all the postponed seasickness were about to strike, there came an insistent, indeed heart-stopping pounding on the front door. “That,” he sighed, “will be the Germans. Only Germans can knock comme ça.” And he had set aside his brush when he chanced to look her way.

Feeling light-headed (she really should’ve eaten, she really should’ve been born a genius, rich, or beautiful, or all three), she had leaned upon the trunk, to prevent a crude stagger forward or perhaps even a fall (the disgrace of that, here!). And the slight pressure of her pianist’s hand caused the petals of the lowest peony to drop, with half a humid sigh, around her tensed white forefinger and thumb on which all weight now pivoted. The chin was lifted, accidentally displaying the long pale neck that her crippled mother had mercilessly and often described as, “along with Muriel’s hands, her one distinguished feature.” The painter saw the face set atop a neck tilting back for breath till it accidentally craned toward seeming almost swanlike, and something, something in the woman’s fortitude at trying to hide her vast disappointment, to hide her vast distinction (which was of the self-same Chartres size), something in the fading light, maybe even something obdurate and half attractive in the bone structure of her sinewy ridged side-face, something there revealed a respect for art so surrendered, so complete, it could not be ordered on demand. And one felt in the artist’s straightening spine, in a bracing almost alarmed, that something had annealed him. It made his habit of social lightness go briefly grave as, reconsidering, he paused, then barked four syllables of Italian at his manservant. One heard the front door open, a low explanation, a grumbled guttural protest, then the door most quietly closing.