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.

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.