Eveline’s pregnancy

Eveline’s pregnancy is a turning point in her relationship with Paul Johnson, transforming a tentative plan for marriage and work into an immediate decision about parenthood. The news emerges not in a settled domestic setting but during an outing beyond Paris, after weeks in which the couple have tried to imagine a shared future. Eveline accepts the pregnancy and says they must face what follows together; the scene records their decision, but does not disclose the child’s eventual fate.

Background and Earlier Expectations

Before the pregnancy, Eveline’s experience of intimacy had included desire, uncertainty, and an earlier encounter with José O’Riely in Santa Fe. After their first meeting, O’Riely told her to take precautions against having a baby, while also saying he would be proud if she bore his child. Eveline was disturbed by the casualness with which he raised the possibility. The episode does not establish that she became pregnant by him; it does show that the prospect of motherhood had already entered her intimate life as something a man could discuss lightly while she confronted its consequences.

Eveline’s circumstances later changed. After Dr. Hutchins recovered from a serious illness, she took him to Santa Fe to recuperate and assumed responsibility for caring for her parents. Her sisters were married, her brother was working abroad, and household duties occupied much of her time. That period placed family care alongside her efforts to develop as an artist. In Paris, she shared an apartment with Eleanor Stoddard and worked at the American Red Cross, preparing scrapbooks of ruined farms and children affected by the war. The work and apartment establish a life beyond her family home, but her relationship with Paul would soon bring questions of marriage, employment, and care into the foreground together.

Plans with Paul Johnson

In the spring, Eveline and Paul spent a night together, and the following day they began discussing a future in the United States. They planned to return as soon as they could, find work in New York, and marry. Paul hoped to study engineering in his spare time and believed he could obtain a position with grain and feed merchants in Jersey City, a firm connected to his father’s acquaintances. Eveline imagined restarting her decorating business. She tried to believe that Paul had the substance to build a life with her, and that their plans could make something lasting of the relationship.

During the remainder of May, their shared optimism was accompanied by financial limits. They spent their pay early and relied on inexpensive set-menu restaurants, where meal tickets cost two francs or two francs fifty. The practical details matter: their imagined marriage was not an abstract promise but a proposed life dependent on finding work and making limited money suffice. Paul appeared more confident than before, while Eveline kept trying to persuade herself that she loved him and that their future could be made workable.

Discovery and Decision

In June, they walked through the forest at St. Germain and Eveline repeatedly felt weak and nauseated, needing to lie down. Paul became increasingly worried as they continued toward a settlement on the Seine River. They crossed the river by a small ferry rowed by an old man, whom Eveline called Father Time. Midway across, she told Paul that she was going to have a baby. The discovery abruptly altered the meaning of their plans: marriage was no longer only a future intention, and the life they had discussed now involved a child.

Paul responded by acknowledging that he had not planned for this and that he should have married her earlier. He said they would marry at once and proposed finding out what permission was required for a marriage in the American Expeditionary Forces. His immediate promise to do his best was mixed with anxiety: he admitted that the pregnancy changed his plans. Eveline answered dryly that it changed hers too. Her response refuses to treat the news as a disruption belonging to Paul alone. The pregnancy makes visible the unequal weight of a decision that both had helped create, while requiring Eveline to reckon with consequences Paul could only promise to share.

Choice and Narrative Significance

On the train back to Paris, Paul asked what he could do to make things right. Eveline told him that she wanted to have the baby and that they would have to go through everything in life. He nodded. The exchange does not resolve the practical questions of their return, employment, marriage, or parenting; instead, it makes Eveline’s choice clear at the moment those questions become unavoidable. Their silence in the third-class compartment, facing one another with their knees touching as the train carried them toward Paris, gives the decision a subdued rather than triumphant conclusion.

The pregnancy therefore marks a shift from imagined partnership to shared responsibility under uncertain conditions. Earlier, Eveline had been unsettled by O’Riely’s casual talk about a possible child; now she names her own decision directly. Paul offers marriage, but Eveline’s statement that the change affects her plans as well prevents his proposal from defining the event on its own. The scene closes with her choosing to continue the pregnancy and face the future with Paul. It does not report a later birth or establish whether their plans are fulfilled.