Eveline Hutchins and Eleanor Stoddard

Eveline Hutchins and Eleanor Stoddard’s relationship joins artistic companionship to professional collaboration. It begins when Eveline, disappointed in love and hoping to make a life through art, meets someone with whom she can talk about painting; it develops into a decorating business in Chicago and later into a route for Eveline to work in Paris. Their friendship offers Eveline independence and shared purpose, but their partnership also contains practical strain and political disagreement.

The Beginning of a Friendship

Eveline meets Eleanor at the Art Institute, wearing a new grey hat she thinks resembles one in a Manet portrait. The conversation matters because Eveline feels Eleanor can talk about painting with genuine interest. She admires Eleanor’s independence and comic way of telling things, and, writing to her brother at boarding school, presents the friendship as something on which she might build a life if romantic love is denied her. The relationship begins not as a rescue by a more experienced friend but as the discovery of a companion whose interests make Eveline feel understood.

That new attachment follows a winter in which Eveline has turned toward art as the purpose of her future. She goes to the Art Institute and tries to paint Chicago’s Lake Front, imagining work with the color of Whistler and the richness of Millet. When her sisters criticize her hair, she insists on wearing it as she chooses. Against this background, Eleanor represents more than a pleasant acquaintance: friendship seems to offer a form of self-directed life that Eveline can pursue without relying on a man’s affection. Her early enthusiasm is emphatic, though the later story will show that their friendship does not make them immune to disagreements or unequal fortunes.

A Shared Business in Chicago

The relationship becomes a working partnership when Eveline and Eleanor start an interior-decorating business in Chicago. Eveline had asked her father for a thousand dollars to begin such a business, and the enterprise that followed with Eleanor brings a concrete form to their shared ambitions. It does not earn as much money as Eveline hoped, and she finds Eleanor trying at times. The partnership is therefore neither a straightforward financial success nor simply an idealized artistic alliance.

Their work nonetheless connects them to a lively social world. Together they meet interesting people and attend parties, first nights, and art openings; Sally Emerson helps place them at the vanguard of Chicago society. Eleanor’s complaints about the young men Eveline collects expose a recurring tension between Eveline’s confidence in struggling people and Eleanor’s concern with the business’s prospects. Eleanor regards these men as poor and as liabilities rather than assets, while Eveline believes they may yet make names for themselves. The disagreement shows their shared enterprise being measured in two ways: by the social and artistic possibilities it opens, and by the practical costs that those possibilities bring.

Eveline’s faith receives a small but vivid confirmation when Freddy Seargeant, who had been a nuisance and had borrowed money from them, gets a production of Tess of the d’Urbervilles staged in New York. Eveline feels triumphant and nearly falls in love with him. The episode does not establish a joint artistic project between Eveline and Eleanor, but it clarifies the difference in their outlooks within the business: Eveline is willing to invest hope in people whose immediate usefulness is doubtful, while Eleanor keeps asking what such attachments mean for the enterprise.

Companionship and Friction in New York

When Eveline later visits Eleanor at her elegant house in the east thirties, the scene suggests that Eleanor’s circumstances have changed. Eleanor is in bed answering mail, carefully dressed, and speaks mysteriously about her business and a financial adviser. She appears to be doing well and says she is on the edge of becoming a theatrical producer. Eveline is pleased to see her, but does not know what to make of these signs of success. The earlier business partnership remains part of their connection, even as Eleanor’s professional position seems to be moving beyond it.

The visit also places a private question beside the limits of what Eveline can ask her friend. Eveline wants to ask Eleanor what she knows about birth control, but never does. When the conversation turns to the war, they quarrel at once. The account gives no resolution or detailed explanation of the dispute; what it does make clear is that affection and shared history do not guarantee agreement on a matter that has become dominant in their lives. Their closeness has room for aspiration and confidences, but the possibility of a difficult question does not itself become a conversation, and political difference interrupts their reunion.

The Paris Offer and the Partnership’s Next Form

The next decisive change comes through Eleanor’s offer of work. As the war reshapes their surroundings and plans for shows and decorating with Eleanor and Freddy come to nothing, Eveline finds it increasingly difficult to keep her attention on New York. Eleanor tells her that she has already asked for Eveline to be her assistant in an office in Paris. Eveline accepts without knowing what the work will be, saying she is willing to do any kind of work. The offer converts friendship into a practical opportunity: Eleanor can help determine where Eveline goes and what work she may do, while Eveline’s readiness makes the offer possible.

Eleanor sails on the Rochambeau; Eveline follows two weeks later on the Touraine. Eveline is eager to leave an America she has come to find tiresome, and the delayed departure, the band, and the uniforms on deck belong to her own unsettled farewell. Still, Eleanor’s departure first and Eveline’s later voyage give the transition a clear relational shape. Their earlier collaboration had joined them in Chicago; now Eleanor’s professional plans draw Eveline across the Atlantic to join her. The evidence establishes the offer and the journey, but does not establish how their Paris working relationship ultimately develops.

Meaning and Limits of the Bond

The relationship’s importance lies in the way it gives Eveline an alternative structure for ambition. After romantic disappointment, she imagines building life on friendship; that idea becomes more than a sentiment when the two women establish a business and, later, when Eleanor offers her work abroad. Their bond brings artistic conversation, social access, shared plans, and professional possibility into the same line of experience.

Yet the friendship is not presented as an uncomplicated refuge. The Chicago business underperforms; Eleanor finds Eveline’s chosen companions financially unhelpful; Eveline’s confidence in them persists; and the reunion in New York ends in a quarrel over the war. The relationship changes form without erasing these differences, moving from artistic discovery to commercial partnership and then toward work in Paris. In a novel whose many lives move forward under the pressure of historical circumstances, their connection is one intimate route through which shifts in work, social life, and wartime allegiance become personal.