Eleanor Stoddard
1919Eleanor Stoddard is an artist, entrepreneur, and influential social presence whose close friendship with Eveline Hutchins links private ambition to the public worlds of business, art, and wartime relief. She helps Eveline imagine a life beyond disappointed romance, then brings her into work and society on both sides of the Atlantic. In Paris, her command of professional and social networks makes her a consequential intermediary, even as the strain between her polished public manner and the unsettled wartime world around her becomes increasingly visible.
Identity and Independence
Eleanor enters Eveline’s life at the Art Institute, where the two begin a friendship grounded in their shared interest in painting. Eveline is struck by Eleanor’s independence, comic way of telling things, and capacity for conversation; friendship offers her a new foundation at a moment when she fears that love has been denied her. The encounter matters not only as companionship but as a model of a life organized around female friendship and work rather than marriage.
That independence takes practical form in Chicago. Eveline and Eleanor establish an interior-decorating business after Eveline decides she needs to work and asks her father for money to start it. The business does not make as much as Eveline hoped, and Eleanor can be difficult to work with, but their enterprise also brings them into contact with lively clients and a busy social world. Eleanor’s complaints that Eveline’s young male acquaintances are poor and liabilities to the business reveal her attention to its finances and prospects; Eveline, by contrast, trusts that the men will eventually make names for themselves.
Eleanor’s ambitions extend beyond decorating. Her position in Chicago society is strengthened by Sally Emerson, who helps bring the partners into the city’s vanguard, while Eleanor’s own later talk of becoming a theatrical producer suggests a willingness to move between commercial work and the arts. In New York she appears in an elegant, expensive-looking home, answering mail in bed in a carefully arranged dressing gown. Her presentation is part of her social competence: she knows how to make her surroundings and appearance register as signs of success.
Friendship with Eveline
The friendship gives Eveline both an ally and a route into adult independence, but it is not an uncomplicated partnership. Eleanor judges the young men Eveline gathers around the business by their material usefulness, while Eveline persists in believing in their artistic futures. Their difference is visible in their respective responses to Freddy Seargeant: Eveline is pleased when he finally produces a play in New York, while Eleanor’s earlier worries about the men’s financial burden have already established a more practical measure of their value.
When Eveline returns to New York, Eleanor is delighted to see her and speaks mysteriously about her business and her possible move into theatrical production. Eveline wants to ask her about birth control, a private and consequential concern, but cannot bring herself to do so. Instead, their reunion turns to the war, and the two quarrel. Their closeness does not erase disagreement: the political crisis enters the friendship directly, where affection and incompatible responses to public events have to occupy the same room.
Eleanor later asks Eveline to become her assistant in Paris. Eveline accepts without caring what the work entails, and the decision gives her a way out of a patriotic New York she has come to find intolerable. Their shared move renews the partnership on a larger stage. In Paris, they live together in an apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle, in an old, grey house with a mansard floor overlooking the Seine and Notre-Dame de Paris. The apartment becomes a domestic center after office work: they take tea by the window in the evenings, while their days are spent assembling scrapbooks of ruined farms and orphaned or starving children for American Red Cross campaigns.
Work, War, and Social Position
The relief work places Eleanor and Eveline amid the machinery of wartime representation. Their scrapbooks are intended to support fundraising at home, turning images of civilian suffering into materials for public appeals. The labor is concrete and repetitive, and it gives the women a role within an institution whose work depends on shaping what distant audiences see. Eleanor’s later connection to J. Ward Moorehouse, who arrives to direct Red Cross publicity, further situates her near the people managing the organization’s public message.
Their Paris household also exposes the distance between official sacrifice and ordinary need. Their cook, Yvonne, uses goods obtained through the Red Cross commissary in a system of barter so that food costs them almost nothing. Eleanor initially tries to stop her, but Yvonne argues that generals and ministers do not go without their luxuries while poor people suffer. Eleanor explains Yvonne’s anger as the result of hardship; Jerry Burnham counters that the wider world, not the cook, is what has gone mad. The episode places Eleanor between charitable administration and a pointed challenge to the inequalities that persist around it.
Eleanor’s political and social judgments remain sharply expressed. When Jerry speaks bitterly about the profits made from war and the dishonesty of reporting, she does not share his stated despair in the same way; their social circle accommodates both his denunciations and her more composed outlook. A dinner with Maurice Millet illustrates another divide. Eleanor finds his religious account of sacrifice and death deeply inspiring, while Eveline does not argue with her. The contrast suggests that the two friends can inhabit the same gathering yet draw different meanings from it.
They also quarrel over what wartime behavior should look like. After a dinner where Jerry gets drunk and speaks frankly about the Allies’ difficulties in Italy, Eleanor objects that their life is becoming too bohemian when soldiers are suffering. Yet she and Eveline soon laugh together about her own disapproval. The exchange gives their disagreement a distinctly social texture: Eleanor invokes propriety and duty, but their intimacy permits the reprimand to soften into shared amusement.
Moorehouse and the Paris Network
J. Ward Moorehouse’s arrival makes Eleanor’s professional and personal position more ambiguous. Before he appears, the publicity office is anxious about his reputation and authority. Eveline notices that Eleanor has had her hair curled on the morning he arrives. At the office Moorehouse presents the Red Cross publicity mission as a campaign to encourage donations and inform the public, warning against critics he characterizes as disloyal or obstructive. Eleanor’s place in this setting connects her to an influential administrator whose work joins relief to persuasion.
During the Peace Conference, Moorehouse’s salon at the Hôtel de Crillon becomes a meeting place for officials and well-connected visitors. Eleanor is frequently present in this social world, while Eveline watches Moorehouse’s attention and feels that Eleanor watches the two of them closely. The relationship is not fully defined by the scenes, but Eleanor’s awareness of their interaction is made unmistakable when Eveline, passing an open bedroom door, sees Moorehouse sitting up in bed and instinctively pulls the door closed. Eleanor notices the gesture and thanks her coolly, framing the moment as concern about the untidy room. The exchange leaves both the intimacy and the rivalry unresolved rather than explaining them away.
Eleanor’s influence is not confined to her association with Moorehouse. When Richard Ellsworth Savage meets her at dinner, he finds her strikingly well dressed and observes her skill at keeping conversation moving, although her talk about the peace conference turns toward malicious details about furnishings and the President’s household. Later, when he is troubled and tired of military life, she asks why he does not remain in Europe and offers to see whether Moorehouse can find him a position among his promising young associates. She recognizes and praises Savage’s appetite for experience, comparing it with Moorehouse’s own energy, while admitting that she herself has lost hers.
That practical advice is accompanied by personal scrutiny. Eleanor tells Savage that she met a friend of his in Rome, a young woman who said they were engaged. Her probing caution against marrying too soon shows that she follows the private consequences of the social connections around her, not merely their professional advantages. Across the novel, Eleanor’s importance lies in this combination: she builds enterprises, opens doors, judges people, and makes friendship a working force, while her composure never entirely conceals the conflicts among ambition, affection, and the demands of a world at war.
