And the lifted dampened brush returned to motion!

“Miss Fraser, stay, please, as you are. Just so. May I impose on you. There IS something. And, with watercolor, we shall soon know. You are quite well?”

“Quite,” said she. “Well,” she, superstitious, added.

Muriel stood facing the light, her long fingers supporting her, fingers strengthened into beauty by simple work—the infinite pressings over smaller hands, the countless virtuoso demonstrations with which she ended each lesson. This veteran hand was now bordered by supple ticklish petals that had made their only sound in falling. The servant arrived just as the aria wound, ratcheting, down; knowing the signs, he did not renew its spiraling blare. The paper where Sargent ministered was secured against its board by common mailing tape. The paper was of excellent nappy texture and was the size of, say, the Declaration of Independence. With music stopped, you could hear his brush now press, now stutter; and Muriel could feel his gaze upon her, warming like the mustard plasters poor Mama liked. There was something therapeutic, being so in the gaze one had just so totally forsworn. Popular journals claimed that Singer Sargent sometimes played his studio piano to cheer and refresh his famous subjects; and Muriel had come to occupy the useful pleasure of posing for fourteen minutes, just long enough to let herself wonder what he would play when and if he played. She was just deciding how to work into impending talk her admiration for his admiration of Fauré when “There,” he said.

“Beg pardon?” Muriel offered. And instantly regretted this common little phrase, wishing she’d merely turned and lifted one eyebrow, but there it was.

“I have taken the liberty,” Singer Sargent said, “of enlarging your hat brim. No criticism of the hat itself implied, you understand, Miss. But only for compositional purposes.”

Muriel stretched slightly (her neck would be stiff during most of the return crossing, so concentrated a pose had she so briefly taken). Ethel meekly rose, then sat again, then stood like a concerned relation called in from the doctor’s antechamber to hear the verdict on some loved one’s life.

“It’s the merest suggestion of you, naturally. However …” And he squinted, stroking the right side of his moustache with the thumb of a hand still holding its brush’s long maroon handle. It was Ethel, clutching her handbag as if yet braving the wooden sidewalks of some dangerous prairie metropolis, who first took a place beside the somber man in black. “Oh, Mur-iel,” the sister cried. And the painter smiled, as with a belief that if the first witness of a portrait exclaimed not to the artist but to its subject—it must be a fair likeness indeed.

“But, Maestro,” Muriel herself ventured, stopping behind him. “However shall I … ? You see, it is ‘I’ as I feel, as well as ‘I’ as God, alas, saw fit to somewhat carelessly make me.” She’d not planned the statement. And it, Muriel admitted later, helped make up for that dreadful tartish Middle West “Beg pardon?” Though not completely.