Eveline Hutchins and Sally Emerson

The relationship between Eveline Hutchins and Sally Emerson begins with an invitation into an artistic world that Eveline has scarcely encountered. Sally recognizes her creative ability, gives her language and examples for thinking about art, and later reminds her of the promise Sally sees in her. Their meetings are few, but the contrast between Sally’s encouragement and Eveline’s subsequent drift away from painting gives the connection its force: it is both an early artistic mentorship and a measure of an ambition Eveline struggles to sustain.

An introduction through art

Sally first enters the Hutchins family’s life through a church charity production of Aglavaine and Selizette. Adelaide meets Sally while seeking advice about the scenery and costumes, and returns impressed not only by Sally’s knowledge of the original production abroad but by her force of personality. She tells her sisters that Sally is “the most stylish woman I ever met.” The family’s excitement around Sally precedes Eveline’s own meeting with her, establishing her as a figure whose interests and presence seem to animate the people around her.

The production does not turn out as the Hutchins girls and their French teacher had hoped. Eveline’s scenery and costume designs, however, are praised as evidence of real ability. The week after the performance, Sally asks to lunch with Eveline alone. Adelaide and Margaret are angry at being excluded, and their resentment makes the invitation feel like a small but consequential separation: Eveline is being addressed not simply as one of the minister’s daughters, but as an artist in her own right. Her sisters lend her a hat and fur neckpiece so she will not disgrace them, yet she arrives chilled and acutely conscious of how young she looks and how poor her dress seems beside Sally’s surroundings.

The lunch and an artistic ideal

The setting intensifies Eveline’s sense of entering another kind of life. After changing in a dressing room filled with brushes, combs, silver jars, powder, rouge, and colored bottles, she sees herself in a large mirror and feels embarrassed by her appearance. She keeps on the fox fur, the one thing she thinks looks right, as she enters a lounge with a deep grey carpet, French windows, a polished grand piano, bowls of freesias, and French and German books of reproductions. Beyond the yellow lace curtains, even Chicago’s soot-darkened blocks seem newly strange and foreign. The room’s cultivated abundance stands in sharp contrast to the home Eveline has just left.

Sally comes in smoking and apologizes for having been held on the telephone. At lunch, Eveline is treated as a grown woman and offered port, though shyness allows her only a sip. Sally praises the costumes and urges her to continue drawing. She argues that Chicago has artistic talent but lacks the milieu—the atmosphere—that would allow it to flourish. Those who care about art, she says, must join together to create that environment, rather than defer to social leaders she considers foolish. Her conversation ranges from Paris to Mary Garden and Debussy. For Eveline, this is not just a list of names: the lunch gathers artistic encouragement, a vision of shared cultural life, and vivid impressions of a world beyond her usual surroundings.

Eveline goes home with her head full of names, pictures, and operatic fragments, still carrying the smell of freesias mixed with toasted cheese and cigarette smoke. Her family’s house now seems cluttered, bare, and ugly, and she bursts into tears rather than answer her sisters’ questions. The scene shows both the exhilaration Sally has awakened and the difficulty of returning from that encounter to a home Eveline suddenly experiences as diminished. The invitation has altered her perception, though it has not yet provided a lasting artistic community or a settled path.

Distance, fantasy, and renewed contact

During the summer after school, Eveline is depressed while staying with her mother in Santa Fé. Away from Sally, she reads extensively and spends long stretches imagining stories about herself and Sally. These private fantasies make Sally more than a person associated with a single lunch: she becomes part of Eveline’s imaginative life. The evidence does not establish that the two share an equally intimate bond; rather, it shows how powerfully Eveline continues to invest Sally with artistic and emotional significance in her absence.

Later, back in Chicago, Eveline sees Sally at a dance she attends with Dirk McArthur. Sally asks whether Eveline has been painting, and Eveline has to admit that she has not. Sally looks disappointed. Eveline tries to cover the admission by speaking quickly about Gordon Craig and a Matisse exhibition she saw in Paris, displaying her familiarity with artistic subjects even as her own practice has lapsed. The exchange marks a gap between the girl Sally encouraged and the artist Eveline has not managed to become—or, more precisely, has not managed to keep practicing.

As Sally is leaving, a young man waits to dance with Eveline. Sally takes her hand and says, “But, Eveline, you mustn’t forget that we have high hopes of you.” The reminder is affectionate but also carries the weight of expectation: Sally speaks as someone who has recognized a possibility in Eveline and wants her not to abandon it. While dancing, Eveline thinks of what Sally stands for and of how wonderful she once thought her. Yet the drive home with Dirk overwhelms those thoughts. The car’s headlights, acceleration, motor, and physical closeness absorb her attention. The relationship’s lasting significance lies in that unresolved contrast: Sally keeps alive an artistic ideal, while Eveline’s immediate life pulls her away from it.