The story’s tone, overall, is fanciful and whimsical to reflect Laura’s privileged upbringing and her upper-class family’s point of view. The story opens with the narrator surveying the Sheridans’ garden, with a focus on its beauty and pleasant qualities:
Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing.
The belief that “roses are the only flowers that impress people” reflects the social norms of the Sheridans and their milieu, as do other statements the narrator makes, such as “it’s so delicious to have an excuse for eating outdoors” and “oh, impossible. Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder.” This pleasant, light tone contrasts with the everyday realities of the world beyond the Sheridan Estate, namely the Cottages as well as the Scott House where Laura encounters Scott’s dead body. In using such a tone, the story suggests that the Sheridans lead a frivolous, childlike lifestyle, ignorant of the world beyond their estate.
Moreover, Mansfield also uses direct address—that is, the second-person point of view—to reveal the Sheridans’ particular preoccupations, behaviors and attitudes. Their class influences all these characteristics, which is evident when the narrator remarks on the karakas (a type of evergreen tree):
They were like trees you imagined growing on a desert island, proud, solitary, lifting their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of silent splendour. Must they be hidden by a marquee?
The karakas are described in whimsical, fanciful terms, and describing them as “proud” makes it clear that the Sheridans even view the nature on their Estate as a point of pride and marker of status. All in all, the story’s tone is meant to emphasize the Sheridans’ preoccupation with things that are beautiful, pleasant, and stately. This naive, childlike outlook conflicts with the reality and tragedy of Scott’s death, as well as life in the Cottages down the hill.
