Five days after her classroom bet with illustration instructor Levon, Clara Darden arrives at the Grand Central School of Art to find that Oliver has been assigned to her class as a live model. Clara conducts the session with deliberate authority, and the class produces its best work yet. Afterward, Lorette offers Clara two illustration sessions for the fall term, convincing her that Levon kept his promise. A student named Cyril then reports a finished artwork has gone missing, noting the same thing happened to other students earlier in the term.

Oliver, waiting outside, leads Clara to the Campbell Apartment, a lavishly decorated party space where a gathering is underway, held in secret to circumvent Prohibition laws. Oliver attempts to impress her by reciting a poem, then admits it belongs to another poet. Furious and embarrassed, Clara retreats to the organ balcony, where Oliver apologizes and explains his conflict between his wealthy background and his desire for his art to stand on its own. He asks to be her muse, kisses her, and invites her to the May Ball the following evening. She accepts.

The morning of the May Ball, Oliver takes Clara to the exclusive Peggy Hoyt shop on Fifth Avenue, where she is fitted in an aquamarine silk gown with an embroidered peacock feather design, charged to his family’s account. He then takes her to tea with his parents, where she meets Oliver’s gentle mother, who harbors failed ambitions of being an artist, and his domineering father, who probes her background. Clara deflects his scrutiny by improvising a story about her family’s prosperity in the Arizona copper mining business. The Smiths’ maid styles her hair, and Clara arrives at the ball looking entirely transformed.

At the ball, a visibly drunk Levon cuts in to dance with Clara, telling her she belongs on a magazine cover. As Clara moves through the glittering room, she is struck with a creative idea: She resolves to simplify her magazine covers to a single figure and convey how fashion feels rather than overloading each image with detail. Five days later, Oliver uses his connections to secure her a meeting at Vogue with Fashion Editor Charles Whittlesley. She presents two new illustrations, arguing that her perspective as a woman gives her a unique ability to communicate the physical experience of fashion. Whittlesley buys both pieces and asks her to return and sign a contract. Back at her building, she finds Oliver waiting outside, and they become lovers.

The day after she and Dennis snuck into the abandoned school, Virginia spends the morning scrubbing the marble base of the information booth. When a regular visitor arrives with two vividly blue-feathered parrots, the color reminds Virginia of the watercolor she found the night before. This triggers the memory of a similar painting she once saw in an auction catalog. After work, she confirms the resemblance: The painting is attributed to Levon Zakarian, a former Grand Central School of Art instructor who died in 1931, with an estimated value of $300,000 to $350,000. A visit to the public library yields little more on either Zakarian or Clara Darden.

Virginia returns home to find the apartment filled with smoke; Ruby accidentally started a fire while trying to build a darkroom in her bathroom. The firemen declare the apartment temporarily uninhabitable. Virginia packs the Clara Darden artwork carefully into a suitcase and follows Ruby to the Carlyle Hotel, where she is shocked to find her younger brother, Finn, performing in Bemelmans Bar; Ruby already knew he was in town. Finn insists they stay with him and his boyfriend, Xavier, in a lavish suite at the hotel. That night, Virginia discovers her apartment insurance policy carries a substantial deductible, adding to her financial strain, but finds some ease in a conversation with Ryan, the Irish bartender.

Two days before Thanksgiving, Virginia visits the Art Students League and meets Janice Russo, the school’s young Ph.D. curator. Janice points out that Zakarian worked exclusively in thick impasto oil, considered the opposite of the watercolor. Janice also explains the history of the anonymous artist known as “Clyde,” whose work bridged early European modernism and American Abstract Expressionism. Clyde’s work was attributed to Zakarian after a 1931 train crash killed him and destroyed Clyde’s entire exhibited body of work.

Turning the watercolor over, Janice recognizes Clara Darden as a commercially successful illustrator who also vanished from the historical record after 1931. Under a magnifying glass, a critical detail emerges: The distinctive curly “C” in Darden’s signature is identical to the one in the Clyde signature. Virginia proposes that Darden was Clyde. Janice estimates the piece at over $150,000 as a Zakarian study, but notes that proving a woman’s authorship could be a major revelation in art history. Virginia lies about the painting’s provenance and arranges a Friday appointment with Irving Lorette, the former director of the Grand Central School of Art.

Back at the terminal, Virginia visits Dennis’s office to view the proposed skyscraper model, finding it unremarkable. The skyscraper will also plunge the terminal into significant darkness. That evening, Virginia returns alone to the abandoned art school and finds newly opened crates and rearranged artwork, suggesting that someone else had broken in. When she hears movement from an adjacent room, she panics and sprints for the exit.

A year after signing with Vogue, Clara is living in a comfortable Fifth Avenue apartment with Oliver managing her professional life while she focuses on a steady stream of commissions and her expanded teaching class. Oliver’s own poetry, however, has stalled entirely. Clara’s deep fear of financial collapse, which is shaped by the experience of watching her father lose his fortune as she was growing up, drives her to take on more work, even as Oliver urges her to slow down.

At a dinner party, a banker named Cavanaugh praises Clara’s illustrations as decorative objects but implies they are not real art. Cavanaugh’s mistress raises the threat of photography replacing illustration. Levon bristles when another guest, Mr. Bianchi, expresses admiration for a fascist poet. Clara steps in to propose a design for an advertising campaign for his company, Studebaker. Oliver tries to steer her away from the idea; she holds firm.

At the Studebaker factory, Clara joins a group of female consultants who have been brought in to suggest how to make the new car model, the Dictator, more appealing to housewives. She dismisses the other female consultants’ conventional suggestions, and insists on walking the factory floor herself. She then directly tells Mr. Bianchi that the Dictator’s interior is poorly designed for women. She sketches Art Deco revisions onto his plans and proposes a formal arrangement to handle both the interior redesign and an ad campaign built around the brand “Styled by Clara Darden” (153). That night, Oliver admits that his hostility to the project stems from his own creative block and frustration at Clara’s growing success.

The following day, Levon waits outside Grand Central and confesses he is afraid of failure, which is causing him to repaint the same subject over and over again. He dismisses Clara’s work as commercial, then abruptly experiences a mental health crisis. He rests his head on Clara’s shoulder and weeps as pedestrians pass.