Eveline Hutchins and José O’Riely

Eveline Hutchins and José O’Riely’s relationship grows out of an artistic encounter in Santa Fe, but it becomes a secret affair whose end exposes the distance between Eveline’s hopes and José’s circumstances. Their connection briefly offers her a sense of aliveness and a new artistic ambition; its conclusion leaves her confronting a man whose family and material needs remain beyond the romantic life she had imagined.

Circumstances and First Meeting

Eveline meets José during a subdued period of family care. After her father, Dr. Hutchins, recovers from a serious illness, she takes him to Santa Fe to recuperate. Her mother is also frequently sick, and with her siblings married or abroad, Eveline assumes responsibility for the household. She manages meals, domestic work, and servants while feeling unhappy despite the landscape, horseback rides, and her efforts to paint. José is the only man she encounters there who makes her feel alive.

José is a painter who supports himself through irregular work, including carpentry and posing. When Eveline asks him to pose while he paints garage doors, he criticizes her pastel. She breaks down; he apologizes, assures her that she has talent, and offers to teach her drawing. He takes her to his modest home in the Mexican part of town, where she meets his wife, Lola, and sees his paintings. The work, large retablos on plaster resembling Italian primitives, changes Eveline’s understanding of him: she sees an artist whose subjects are working-class martyrs, rather than the conventional wealthy patrons his wife hopes he will paint. Eveline is thrilled by the pictures and promises to promote them among her friends, convinced that she has discovered a genius.

Art, Attraction, and Unequal Expectations

The artistic connection becomes personal. José is grateful for Eveline’s support and stops charging her for posing or criticism; at times he borrows small amounts from her as a friend. Eveline, before the relationship has fully begun, decides that it will be a genuine affair. Her expectation is bound up with dissatisfaction: she feels that something must happen to her, and José’s attention seems to offer a break from the dutiful, restricted life she has been leading.

Their circumstances make privacy difficult. Eveline’s studio is behind her family home, where her parents or visiting friends might interrupt them, and people in the small town have begun to notice how often José visits. One night, while the Hutchins’ chauffeur is away, they meet in his room above the garage. The encounter is intimate, but not the ecstatic experience Eveline had anticipated. Afterwards, José speaks against keeping the relationship hidden and proposes that they find a more open place to meet. His manner strikes her as grave and indulgent, while his talk of drawing her body as inspiration makes the connection seem at once artistic and personal. When he raises the possibility of a child and urges her to take precautions if she does not want one, Eveline is horrified by what she experiences as his casualness. The episode already contains a mismatch: she has invested the affair with the promise of transformation, while he speaks of its practical and artistic dimensions.

A Hidden Arrangement and Its Exposure

For the rest of the winter, they meet a couple of times a week in a deserted cabin in a small rocky canyon outside town. Eveline rides there by one route and José walks by another, and they call the place their desert island. The name captures the temporary world they make for themselves, separated from the household duties and public notice that constrain them. Yet the concealment does not hold.

José’s wife finds hundreds of drawings of the same nude woman among his portfolios and goes to the Hutchins home, distraught and threatening Eveline. Eveline is frightened but keeps her composure. She tells Dr. Hutchins that she had allowed José to draw her but denies that anything else had happened. She disparages Lola as ignorant and presents the accusation as a mistaken inference about a man and woman being alone together. Her father scolds her for imprudence but believes her; together they keep the affair from Eveline’s mother. Eveline’s account protects her from immediate exposure, but it also marks a division between the private relationship and the respectable family life she must preserve.

Separation and Significance

After the confrontation, Eveline sees José only once more. He explains that he cannot leave his wife and children to starve. He depends on family life and ordinary work, he says, and Lola has made him promise not to see Eveline again. He describes his wife as a good woman, despite his complaints about her, and treats his obligations as unavoidable. Eveline turns away before he has finished. Glad to have her horse, she rides off rather than continue the conversation.

The ending is decisive because it replaces Eveline’s imagined artistic-romantic discovery with a conflict grounded in livelihood, marriage, and responsibility. She had taken José’s paintings as evidence of genius and his attention as the beginning of a life-changing affair; his final explanation insists on the conditions he cannot simply discard. Her departure is not a negotiated resolution but a refusal to remain for the rest of his account. The brief relationship thus joins artistic admiration to intimacy, then exposes how differently the two understand what that intimacy can require.