Elliott Hubbard's second wife, Emily is a dreamy painter and a muddy abstractionist, whose canvases fill the holes left when first wife Alice claims the Cézanne, Seurat, Cassatt, and Hicks. Emily and Hubbard have a son, Julian, who looks like Elliott. Emily dreads meeting protagonist Paul Christopher, because of the sad life he has lived and her inability to understand his poetry. Emily is "a serious painter, but not a very talented one" (pg. 159), as Alice, her predecessor, cattily points out at every opportunity. Emily dies early of cancer.