ringmaster might crack a whip to stir up the performers. But from the start it was obvious that he did not wish to be included in the group at all. Finally he rose. “Whatever metaphysical egotism may assert,” he said, “one cannot vote to be created,” and left the room.

This left four philosophers. It also left mother’s composition in ruins. Dominating the ruins sat Hugo Münsterberg. How, she wondered, could she rescue her picture from complete disaster? Then she knew. Early the next morning, she hurried to Emerson Hall, picked up her paint rag, and with three strokes removed the discordant note, leaving only the chair in which the burly professor had wished to sit. Three philosophers remained. Mother started work. Things went smoothly. Royce cooled down; James accepted the profile amiably, saying he could probably see farther and straighter with one eye than Royce could with two. Palmer got to stand.

William James was the first to pose. A fragile man, lightly bearded, James had a charming smile, a tranquil manner, an affable friendliness, and a flower pulled through his lapel. His clothes looked as if they had come freshly pressed from the cleaner; and his mind seemed to have blown in on a storm.

But he was an easy man to paint. Perhaps realizing that an artist works best with the mind turned off, he made no demands on her attention.

Not so Josiah Royce, who posed next. When he entered mother’s studio for his first sitting, he said, “Why, hello,” as if surprised at his own arrival. Reluctantly, he climbed up on the model stand for the embarrassing ordeal of having what he called “poor ugly me” examined in detail. He was a small but impressive man with a large, tousled head, pale blue eyes beneath a protruding brow. He wore a rumpled suit which had once been gray, but now was green from age and frequent cleanings.

For a few minutes he sat stiff and ill at ease. Then, forgetting himself, he exchanged embarrassment for the livelier pastime of metaphysical acrobatics. James had warned Mother that Royce would want to probe her mind. Royce, he had said, had a mania for it. James was right.

“I’ve thought a lot,” he said, “about that multiple, tenuous, vagrant something philosophers call personality. But I never knew how an artist went about transforming it into paint on canvas. What, exactly, do you think as you first start your painting?” he asked. Mother, who couldn’t work and be probed at the same time, answered dizzily, “I’m painting, not thinking.”

This didn’t quiet Royce. He was immediately off into another line of questioning. Finally, mother had to ask him please to keep his mouth closed: she couldn’t paint something that was always in motion, could she? He snapped his lips together, arranged his face into a rigid mask of discomfort, and the painting began.

When the posing was over, Royce relaxed

and took out his cigar. This cigar was apparently the big event of his day. He made a ceremony of it, smoking slowly and with concentrated enjoyment. When the stub grew too short to hold, he spiked it on the point of his knife for a last pull. While he smoked, he seemed to forget “poor ugly me”; mother said his face lit up with its own unique and inner beauty.

George Herbert Palmer was the last of the triumvirate to come for his sitting and was the easiest to paint. It was a joy to be with him. Santayana said of Mr. Palmer that he was the only member of their department who had learned the art of eloquent simplicity.

Mother knew Mr. Palmer better than the others, having once painted a portrait of his wife, Alice Freeman Palmer, Wellesley’s first president, who had died tragically young. While he sat posing, he liked to talk about her and to recite some of the poems she had written to him. He knew them all by heart. A mere stem of a man with huge bristling eyebrows and a monstrous mustache covering most of the lower part of his face, Mr. Palmer was not a romantic-looking person. To mother it seemed incongruous to hear these words of young love pouring through the gray blanket of hair on his lip. Recited Mr. Palmer: “In the splendor/ Deep and tender/  Hushed I meet you/ Touch and greet you/ Oh my best!”

On and on went Mr. Palmer’s musical voice, winding its sweetness through Emerson Hall. He forgot mother. He forgot the portrait. He was back in the spring with the girl he had loved. This little old man behind his huge eyebrows and mustache had known—to use his own phrase—“the profusion of exultant life.”

At last the painting was finished. But mother wasn’t satisfied with it. The space where Santayana should have stood bothered her; so did Münsterberg’s empty chair. A chair with no one sitting in it didn’t make sense, she thought. She painted it out. This left a vacant spot. She painted it back again. In and out went Münsterberg’s chair. At last it was time to deliver the painting to Harvard. Back went the chair once more, and there it remains.

The portrait of James, Royce, and Palmer still hangs in Emerson Hall. With them are the phantoms of Santayana and Münsterberg, who really belonged in the group.

“I was too young when I knew these men,” mother wrote me years later. “Blessings touch us so lightly that before we can even name them they are gone. It has made me mindful of the present. Each day I look about me and ask myself what riches am I missing that I may later sorrow to have lost?”