Sally Emerson

Sally Emerson, or Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson, is an established advocate of the arts whose advice and expectations shape Eveline Hutchins’s early sense of artistic possibility. She offers Eveline a vision of the milieu an artist needs, then becomes a measure of the aspirations Eveline has not managed to pursue.

Introduction and Artistic Authority

Sally first enters the Hutchins family’s circle through Adelaide. As the family prepares an Easter charity production of Aglavaine and Selizette, their French teacher recommends consulting Sally about scenery and costumes: she has seen the original production abroad, and her interest, the teacher believes, could help the project succeed. Adelaide returns from meeting her excited by Sally’s knowledge and the prospect of her visit.

At their first lunch together, Sally arrives smoking a cigarette and apologizes for having been delayed by a telephone call. Eveline is treated as an adult and served port, though she only dares take a sip. Sally praises the costumes Eveline has designed and urges her to continue drawing. Her advice quickly widens into a view of artistic life: Chicago has artistic ability, she argues, but lacks the atmosphere that would allow it to flourish. The few who care about art must join together to create that environment, rather than rely on the city’s social leaders, whom Sally dismisses as hostile to serious artistic work.

Influence on Eveline

Sally’s conversation gives artistic ambition a social and intellectual setting. She speaks of Paris, Mary Garden, and Debussy, and Eveline leaves with her head full of names, images, and fragments of opera. The contrast with home is immediate: the house seems cluttered, bare, and ugly to her, and she bursts into tears without explaining herself to her sisters. Sally’s influence is therefore more than technical encouragement about costumes or drawing; her account of artistic life changes how Eveline sees her surroundings, while also sharpening her dissatisfaction with them.

That influence recurs when Eveline later sees Sally at a dance she has attended with Dirk McArthur. Sally is leaving as a young man waits to dance with Eveline. When Sally asks about her work, Eveline has to admit that she is not painting. Sally looks disappointed, and Eveline feels ashamed. She begins speaking quickly about Gordon Craig and a Matisse exhibition she has seen in Paris, as if knowledge of art might answer for the work she has stopped doing. Sally’s reminder that she has high hopes for Eveline stays with her as she dances, bringing back both her admiration for Sally and the artistic commitment she has failed to maintain.

Expectations and Narrative Role

Sally’s effect on Eveline rests on a combination of encouragement and expectation. She recognizes Eveline’s ability, gives her access to a wider artistic world, and insists that drawing should continue; later, her disappointment makes Eveline confront the gap between that promise and her own inactivity. The evidence does not show Sally directing Eveline’s choices, but it does show her serving as a forceful standard against which Eveline measures herself.

Through Sally, artistic aspiration is presented as both individual practice and a matter of shared surroundings: talent needs work, but also a supportive milieu. Her appearances mark two stages in Eveline’s response to that idea—first the exhilaration of discovering an artistic world, then the embarrassment of having drifted from its demands. Sally thus remains significant less through a long personal history than through the ideals she articulates and the expectations Eveline carries away from their encounters.