Brevoort Café is one of the places where Eveline Hutchins’s artistic and personal lives meet. Its lively company, late conversations, and familiar warmth frame both her tentative closeness with Freddy Seargeant and her return to New York after a year away.

A Gathering Place for Artistic Ambitions

Eveline spends late evenings at Brevoort Café talking with Freddy over Rhine wine and seltzer. The room is crowded with people she finds interesting, and its cigarette smoke and animated social atmosphere make it a setting for more than a private meeting: it belongs to the cultural world she hopes to enter. There she can imagine a future shaped by theatre and artistic work, even as her own feelings remain unsettled.

One night, Eveline and Freddy plan a repertory theatre devoted to American plays. They picture Freddy as an American Stanislavsky and Eveline as an American Lady Gregory, with the possibility that she might also take on the role of an American Bakst. When the café closes, Eveline invites him to her room by a separate staircase. Their conversation turns from theatrical plans to physical intimacy; she lets him kiss her but thinks of Dirk McArthur and asks Freddy not to stay that night. Brevoort Café thus marks the threshold between a shared artistic fantasy and a relationship Eveline cannot yet choose.

A Measure of Eveline’s Uncertainty

The café’s late-night setting gives Eveline space to consider whether she wants a love affair with Freddy. She watches him through the cigarette smoke and weighs her attraction against her attachment to Dirk. After Freddy leaves, she half regrets turning him away, aware of her desire but not ready to resolve it. The next morning, before she can decide what she feels, a telegram summons her home because her father, Dr. Hutchins, is seriously ill. Freddy puts her on the train; the departure does not become the overwhelming romantic parting she had expected.

A Point of Return

After caring for her parents in Santa Fe, Eveline returns east and reaches Brevoort Café feeling frightened and nauseated, having decided during the train journey that she is pregnant. The café offers a brief physical respite: she drinks coffee, and the sunlight and warm restaurant atmosphere help her feel better. From there she telephones Eleanor Stoddard, then Freddy, who says he will come as soon as he can get over from Brooklyn. The sequence makes the café a practical point of re-entry into Eveline’s earlier New York life, as well as a place where she resumes contact with the people and creative projects she left behind.