Maybe it was above some massive Bösendorfer grand, maybe in just such a lakefront palace, perhaps while listening to an eight-year-old millionaire bed-wetter punish the keyboard up and down, then down and up, maybe there Muriel saw her first Sargent. She discovered another fine example at the new Art Institute. Miss Muriel Fraser, a chaste girl, nineteen, then, suddenly and unfairly, twenty-seven, now somehow edging toward her thirties, Muriel—in her fitch-fur collar and matching muff dyed to seem mink—studied one of Mr. Sargent’s early improvements on a local meatpacking heiress. In the picture, Muriel found something autobiographical. Not in the silly woman herself, no, but in the heiress’s hastily rendered white satin, her ropes of all-too-real pearls rendered as globules of cream-colored oil paint that, at a distance of six feet, became pearlier than any oyster’s best try. It was exactly the upgrading of reality to which Muriel, as pianist, expatriate, and practical dreamer, subscribed. If you could not be a great artist yourself, then you drew near the best one alive. This, perhaps, was as close as any uncourted piano teacher and former prodigy could come if not to love, then at least to honor. A close second, surely. And the Master you knew enough to choose? He saved you, and, with you, redeemed your clan’s tarnished dignity. For how long? Merely Forever.

Muriel, being eldest of the daughters, best remembered the stone manse full of bustled servants and amateur theatrics. She recalled the scent of blossom from the apple orchard when Papa claimed the whole seven acres were “under full sail.” One entire attic room held costumes, ancestors’ greasy periwigs, snuff-stained red brocade frock coats. Muriel remembered shopkeepers dropping half-curtseys to Professor Fraser’s daughters, now reduced to bowed shopkeepers themselves. Looking up at the yards of canvas still so lushly painted that they seemed eternally wet, transitive, maybe Muriel first phrased the notion, “Might this not constitute a knowingness to stave off losses? Is this not a baffle against such renters’ sadness as we now live in? Could this not be, at last, the distinguished thing?”

Over the mantel of the Frasers’ railroad flat there hung a mammoth gilt-framed mirror. Of no value, it was intended to lighten a dim room too prosaic with its sooty airshaft view, too sobered by crackled varnishes, too earnestly poetic with its wistful peafowl hangings. Imagine the restitution performed by a Sargent of some loved one. Set in the simplest silver frame, it would replace that heavy, ugly, hopeful, empty mirror.