How Do I Look?

Associated with Aphrodite and spring flowers, The Three Graces were considered the youthful granters of beauty in all its forms: physical, intellectual, and moral. And so, they were a suitable motif for decorating toilet articles such as this mirror, on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In The Deadliest Hate, Miriam spots the flag for The Three Graces, the inn in Caesarea where Judah has reserved lodgings for her and Phoebe:

One more block of huddled tenements and I spotted the flag for The Three Graces unfurling in a passing breeze. Three lithe maidens, the goddesses of Joy, Cheer, and Beauty, festooned with diaphanous streamers danced in a loving embrace. The inn itself had a porticoed, marble façade guarded by griffins gazing past a copper fountain into a garden-edged, oval pool. But upon close inspection, I could see that the marble was faux, the portico crumbling, the griffins cracked, the garden overgrown, the fountain dry, and the pool a waterless basin of chipped tiles and nesting vermin.

Fortunately, you don’t have to stay there to read The Deadliest Hate. Miriam describes the room as “a low-raftered, saggy-floored, attic cella overlooking the street.” All you have to do is click here.