Chicago

Chicago is the setting for Eveline Hutchins’s passage from a minister’s daughterhood structured by family and religious expectation to a young woman pursuing artistic and professional independence. The city enters her story through specific spaces: a crowded family house, the social world of parties and exhibitions, and the café conversations in which she weighs love and ambition.

Family Homes and Childhood

Eveline’s early home stood on North Shore Drive, where she lived on the top floor of a yellow-brick house with her sisters Arget and Lade and her younger brother Gogo. The floors arranged family life by role and authority. Below the children’s rooms were Dr. Hutchins’s study, where he was not to be disturbed, and her mother’s room, where she painted through the morning in a lavender smock. The ground floor held the drawing room and dining room, where parishioners visited and the children were expected to be seen but not heard. At dinner, the sounds of company fell silent when Dr. Hutchins’s booming voice took over.

That household contained both tenderness and constraint. At night, Eveline was frightened when her father stood by the bed to hear the girls’ prayers, and felt safe only after she had burrowed beneath the covers. Yet memories of illness also held pleasure: when the children had measles and mumps, their mother read to them and drew pictures, while their father made paper bird beaks and invented stories. The Chicago home thus appears not simply as a place of strict rules, but as a space where fear, care, religious authority, and childhood delight were closely layered.

When Eveline was twelve, the family moved to a larger house on Drexel Boulevard. Her sisters went east to boarding school at New Hope, and her mother spent the winter in Santa Fé for her health. Eveline remained with her father, her brother, and Miss Mathilda. She disliked school but enjoyed studying Latin with her father and having him work through algebra equations with her. She admired his preaching and took pride in being the minister’s daughter, even as she began asking him why God did nothing about Chicago’s poverty and social ills. He told her she was too young to worry about them; she called him Dad and considered herself his Pal.

Artistic Ambition and the City’s Poverty

Eveline’s early artistic ambitions took shape alongside religious and charitable feeling. A book of Rossetti paintings sent by her mother captivated her; she repeated the painter’s full name to herself and began painting and writing verses about angels and poor children at Christmas. Her first oil painting, a portrait of Elaine, the Fair, was praised by the family’s friends, who began introducing her as the talented one. Her concern for Chicago’s poor was similarly real, though still framed by the sheltered household in which she had grown up: poverty frightened her, troubled her, and raised questions her father deferred.

Work and Cultural Circles

As a young woman, Eveline started an interior-decorating business in Chicago with Eleanor Stoddard. The business earned less than Eveline had hoped, and Eleanor could be difficult to work with, but the partnership brought them into a wide social and artistic circuit. They attended parties, first nights, and art exhibitions; Sally Emerson helped place them at the vanguard of Chicago society. The city’s cultural life offered Eveline both contacts and an audience for her confidence in the young men around her, many of whom Eleanor regarded as financial liabilities rather than assets.

Freddy Seargeant’s eventual success with a New York production of Tess of the d’Urbervilles seemed to vindicate Eveline’s faith in those struggling associates. She was so triumphant that she almost fell in love with him. She was fond of Freddy and knew he loved her, but could not imagine marrying him and did not feel carried away by him. Their late conversations over Rhine wine and seltzer at the Brevoort Café gave her room to consider whether she wanted a love affair at all. In this Chicago setting, professional hopes, artistic sociability, and romantic choice meet without resolving into a single path: the city is where Eveline begins making a life of her own, while she is still deciding what that life should contain.