Framed in the thinnest of stark silver frames (Muriel believed that gold smacked of stockyard owners’ carnivorous pride), a glass-fronted watercolor replaced the mantel’s heavy mirror. The crowded little parlor benefited from the picture’s style, force, and lightly distinguished presence. Younger sisters sometimes said they missed consulting the central looking-glass, but Muriel’s mother asked to be carried in and propped before the painting, hours at a time. It soothed her as nothing else did.

They decided to take down the peafowl hangings that flanked the fireplace. True, the crackled plaster showed, but now it seemed more eccentric, less pitiful. Though Papa was terribly critical of those boys brave enough to court his girls (such swains all proved to be mere Americans!), two sisters did bring home nice young men to see “the family Sargent.” Three boys’ genteel mothers came to pay respects. Muriel was asked to lend the picture to an exhibition in New York. She consented. Two Chicago papers reproduced Sargent’s portrait of her. One caption referred to her as “the distinguished local pianist and sometime coach to the finest of our youthful Lakeside keyboard talent.”

III. REWARD

The painting now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. The woman shown looks, if not beautiful, then doggedly high-minded and, far better, a bit mischievous. Her expression contains qualities associated with the Scottish national character. Like the bagpipe’s wailing tone, her smile combines pagan playfulness with a mournful Nordic solemnity. (Golf, the major export of Scotland, with its elaborate strategy for a dubious end, might offer another example.)

Arranged in profile against a pearl-gray suggestion of window panes and drapery, one hand’s tripod of tensed fingers rests among the scattered petals as she stands confronting daylight; she seems between appointments, lost in some personal rewarding reverie.

She is pale but fixed, and the one depicted corner of her mouth shows something gleeful, as if the subject is plotting or, indeed, achieving, at the very moment of depiction, a goal, a comeuppance, a sweet payback fervently sought. Is the joke that an unwed, unrich, quite smart, forward-looking piano enthusiast from the Middle West has just attained something so long wished for? It is an expression that might be termed “intellectual happiness”—that joy some feel must be a contradiction in terms but which, made flesh here, quite plainly is not. Here use and pleasure, practice and performance are joined at last and for all time. The distinguished thing, intact and, via clarion water-clear understatement, preserved, preserved.

The wide dark hat and a hastily rendered lace collar on a black black dress, all this could have only been done very fast, in speedy watercolor, by a genius of some sort, between other obligations, all at once, by accident. His accident, her plan.