Professor Fraser, his ladies, and their nineteen trunks (packed with one year’s art supplies for the daughters) arrived, unheralded, in the mythic Chicago of the 1870s. The town had a cowboy novel’s mules and dust. After rain, it became a Venice made of mud. Painted women, revealing entire inches of dead-white ankle, loitered under gas streetlamps in even the best neighborhoods. Civil War veterans, their blue uniforms emptied of legs and arms, begged, aggressive, on street corners. No building looked more than six months old. To the stately Professor’s four virgin daughters, workmen muttered personal ghastly things. Stockyards brought the scent of reality into the most elevated thought. Everything seemed omen.

One afternoon, to cheer five womenfolk, Donald Fraser squired them toward high tea at what, one heard, was the best hotel. It featured Chicago’s first revolving door. But a crowd stood pressing noses to the portal’s fanning glass. One clever brown hen had escaped a passing farm cart. She then dashed toward safety but chose a door like an upright threshing machine made of mirror. Professor Fraser could see the chicken in there, still alive and flapping against tile floor, her head twisted beneath the rotating black rubber flange, her red wattle seeped out from underneath like black rubber’s own red rubber blood.

“Don’t look, Muriel,” the Scotsman told his eldest girl and confidante, who looked. Nobody could push the door without killing the bird. Her free wing beat so, trying to lift a ten-story building nesting on her spine. The crowd of city swells in fur, velvet, and cashmere seemed unconcerned about one chicken’s life, but everyone acted embarrassed that a single country fowl could block entry to so fine an establishment, and at teatime. Muriel, having peeked, her face a stark white vertical beneath its tweed bonnet, now tried to hold cupped hands over three younger sisters’ eyes. “It’s a hurt one,” she explained. “If you see it, you’ll remember, so don’t … please.” The youngsters peeked; crying resulted. Muriel already understood: This sight had entered her forever, a hen was lodged there in that door and the sight was in her now.

The family soon discovered: homesickness meant just that—sickness, a stubborn flu of longing. Sometimes the sight of a letter’s pink Scottish stamp could send any of them unto nausea itself. The girls did sketches of Sunnyside’s apple orchard. Muriel, the astute eldest, Papa’s favorite, portrayed Sunnyside’s foyer. She showed its William Morris laurel wallpaper backing forty frames of Piranesi’s classical ruins. She even added the yellow ceramic umbrella-stand, crammed with hawthorn walking sticks and houseguests’ orphaned umbrellas. Her drawing made the container seem so avuncular a jumble that, according to Papa, it looked the very portrait of Mr. Holmes’s squat, companionable sidekick, Dr. Watson. “I see that.” Muriel nodded, smiling.