Dans les dernières pages de The Tragic Muse, Miriam Rooth suggère plaisamment à Nick de faire poser Gabriel Nash pour un portrait : ce serait une bonne façon de se débarrasser de lui.
Gabriel consented to sit; (...) and he came back three times for the purpose. Nick promised himself a deal of interest from this experiment, for with the first hour of it he began to feel that really as yet, given the conditions under which he now studied him, he had never at all thoroughly explored his friend. His impression had been that Nash had a head quite fine enough to be a challenge, and that as he sat there day by day all sorts of pleasant and paintable things would come out in his face. This impression was not gainsaid, but the whole tangle grew denser. It struck our young man that he had never seen his subject before, and yet somehow this revelation was not produced by the sense of actually seeing it. What was revealed was the difficulty--what he saw was not the measurable mask but the ambiguous meaning. He had taken things for granted which literally were not there, and he found things there--except that he couldn't catch them--which he had not hitherto counted in or presumed to handle.
Pour la première fois, Nash se tait ou plutôt apparait autrement que selon sa conversation brillante et bavarde. Le personnage n'est pas démasqué, il change de sens et se charge d'ambiguïté. Mais Nash se renfrogne et semble goûter fort peu cette expérience - si bien qu'après la troisième séance, il manque le rendez-vous. Les jours passent, Nash ne revient pas. Son portrait reste inachevé. Nick a l'étrange impression que les lignes qu'il a tracées peu à peu s'effacent et que la toile redevient blanche.