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“What do you say?” a startled Joseph asked.

“I say I am tired of these accusations,” Edith replied.

“Please remember you are talking to your father.”

“Certainly, but I must defend myself. It is not fair.”

“Fair or not fair, don’t forget that you are talking to your father. If you are going to talk that way, I wish you would leave the table.”

“I was going when you came, but I came back to talk to you.”

“I don’t want you to talk to me in that way. I don’t want you at the table if you intend to talk that way. Don’t come to the table. Don’t come back to the table at all.”

Kate had mailed her birthday greeting to Joseph from London because the celebrated artist John Singer Sargent was painting her portrait there. Both she and Joseph had long sought a chance to sit for Sargent. James Tuohy, the World’s London bureau chief, was given the assignment to procure the sittings. Like most emissaries, Tuohy had found it hard to meet with Sargent. “He requires very delicate handling, and is absolutely overwhelmed with commissions,” he had reported two years earlier. Pulitzer’s longtime friend and companion George Hosmer was also enlisted in the effort and tried to chase down Sargent when he came to Boston. “Will pay anything he wants,” Pulitzer telegraphed Hosmer.

Finally the painter consented to having Kate sit for him. “He seems greatly interested in the portrait,” Kate excitedly wrote to Joseph after her first day with Sargent. “He is a wonderful artist. I think a genius, his portraits haunt one, he has two or three in his studio now which are quite wonderful.” As he sketched her, Sargent told Kate stories of other sittings, describing one of his subjects as “the most objectionable type of a money-grasping, vulgar, Sixth Avenue Jew,” oblivious of the fact that Kate had married a Jew.

By mid-May, the sittings came to an end. The completed painting showed Kate in a beguiling pose, standing by a table, her hair coiffed toward the back of her head, her arms to her side, wearing a low-cut dress with many folds and ruffles. She looks demurely outward as if watching someone. In Aix-les-Bains, Joseph received a firsthand report on the portrait from Edith, who wired him an excited appraisal upon its completion. Joseph sent his thanks to the painter. “Sincere thanks on behalf of future generations,” he wrote. “Alas, alas that I cannot see it myself.” After much inveigling by Kate, Sargent agreed to paint Joseph as well. “I feared it was a hopeless task when I broached the subject as he had refused so many,” Kate wrote to Joseph, “but a woman can coax a really great man into any halfway reasonable thing.”

Her portrait complete, Kate left England for a cure in France in the company of Constance and Edith. Instead of joining Joseph in Aix-les-Bains, she went to Divonne-les-Bains. There Kate was told that Catherine Davis, her ninety-year-old mother, who had fallen ill a few weeks earlier, was dead. Although the news was not unexpected, its arrival hit Kate hard. “She collapsed entirely and has been neither able to eat nor sleep since, even with very large doses of medicine each night,” Maud Alice Macarow, her faithful companion, wrote to Joseph.

Kate wanted to leave and return immediately to the United States. Her doctor, however, insisted that she remain in Divonne-les-Bains. Joseph concurred. “I forbid your mother sailing,” he wired Edith. “Both you and Constance must do your utmost to comfort your mother.” He instructed Joe, who was in New York, and his secretary George Ledlie to attend the funeral in Washington, where Catherine Davis had lived with her other daughter, Clara. But a day later, Joseph changed his mind. “If you are feeling strongly to sailing, upon reflection, I withdraw my objection.” By then, Kate had reconciled herself to missing the funeral.

Almost in a pique of jealousy that Kate’s illness outranked his, Joseph sent her one of the angry, spiteful letters he was so capable of writing. Fortunately