This anthology was published after her death by her husband John Middleton Murry. Murry wrote in his introductory note that this volume contains the stories written between Bliss: and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party: and Other Stories (1922). The additional stories are the earlier first four stories, plus "Sixpence" (which Mansfield thought sentimental) and "Poison".
By : Katherine Mansfield (1888 - 1923)
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The Woman at the Store
Jo, Hin, and the narrator are riding horses, then they stop at a store where Hin went four years ago, joking that a blue-eyed blonde lives there. There they are greeted by a woman who appears to be mentally unstable and disheveled with missing teeth. They get an embrocation from the store to treat a wound on the horse, they ask her if they can stay in the nearby field at first she declines then she agrees she later suggests giving them dinner and at the part she eventually lets them stay for the night in the store. Jo and Hin joke about the woman referring to how she knows 'how to kiss one hundred and twenty-five different ways'.
The Narrator bathes in the river.
They discover that the woman has attempted to make herself look pretty by putting on a rouge and a different dress. Jo has combed back his hair, shaved, and changed. They start to get drunk and Jo and The Woman start 'kissing feet' under the table, slowly growing closer as they get more intoxicated. The Woman's daughter claims to be drawing a nude picture of the Narrator, saying she watched her bathing earlier. The Narrator is unsettled but the picture is not revealed.
As she gets more drunk The Woman claims that her husband often beats her, forces sex on her, goes away often shearing for months at a time and that she is alone and isolated living in poverty. She then leaves and comes back and then goes off again. Her daughter threatens to draw the picture she's not allowed to and gets a smack and a stern warning from her mother.
Hin and the Narrator stay in the storeroom with The Woman's daughter. She then does a drawing of a woman pointing a gun at a man and a picture of a grave, hinting that her mother killed her father, thus exposing at least part of The Woman's story as untrue. Hin and the Narrator see the drawing, stay up all night in shock, and then leave in the morning without Jo who has spent the night in The Woman's bed.
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