The two drifted past the front desk, failing to acknowledge the greeting of the bellman. Only when alone together did they embrace. Then unexpectedly they sobbed. They could not stop weeping. “Poor Mama,” Muriel said, as if explaining everything. The sisters seemed to cry for injustices endured. And not only by their loved ones. No, by everybody. The whore’s belief that her own breath might resurrect cloth violets. To be paid, in flipped coins, from a macaroon tin. The difficulty of quite literally every day on earth. How very odd that achieving some small token of justice should release in you not license toward a pure lit joy but descent into such careening blackened rage. The Fraser girls were both so wracked by heaves and bleats, they soon commenced laughing. They pointed to each other’s tear-painted face. It was only after ordering a full cream-tea, served in their rooms (an additional expense), only then did they dare turn up the gas lamp, and take out the picture, and look at it.

Still holding on to each other, the sisters agreed it had the grandeur of his massive oil portraits but the intimacy, the atmospheric jeweled flash, of his best watercolors. It resembled Muriel but made her look, if no prettier, thank God—for flattery per se was her worst fear—then better. Just “better”—not overly elongated but more distinguished because, quite simply, more visibly herself than ever before.

Come morning, Muriel would send, by messenger, the jet-worked black purse containing American bills in the amount of $400. Along with it, a three-sentence note: “I know the Caravaggios and have been painted by Sargent. I can now say I have experienced the ultimate. My thanks, and my sister’s, for your hospitality. Muriel Fraser.”

(Her original note contained the postscript: “Have the Germans re-stormed the citadel?” But, after consulting her sister—an executive secretary, after all, who had used three years’ future vacations to come along—Muriel reconsidered and—wisely, I believe—copied the lines afresh, without that overfamiliar aside.)

By return, their messenger brought the artist’s simple vellum notepaper, “The pleasure was all on my side, I assure you. JSS,” and the reticule. When Muriel glimpsed the money still folded inside, she had a sinking spell. It was only after her sensible and better-looking sister got her seated and wrapped a blanket round the subject’s legs, that Ethel thought to actually count the money. Maestro had seen fit to keep back $200 but had returned the rest and, of course, the handsome little beadwork bag itself.

The boat fare, the cost of boarding for three weeks, the travel within England, and the return trip to Chicago—added to the price of the portrait—cost my Great-aunt Muriel nearly $900. Her dowry and savings gone, she would—without regret—take on years of additional night pupils to help justify and offset the single great expense of her life. But, she was later told, those with four times that amount to spend, those with pedigrees and ambassadorial letters of a magnitude far beyond even those wangled by Wrigleys, Armours, Palmers, and Fields, even those persons failed to achieve an audience with the great man, much less a picture.