In the early moments of the story, Mansfield utilizes a stream of consciousness narrative style to describe Miss Meadows's surroundings:
Girls of all ages, rosy from the air, and bubbling over with that gleeful excitement that comes from running to school on a fine autumn morning, hurried, skipped, fluttered by; from the hollow classrooms came a quick drumming of voices; a bell rang; a voice like a bird cried, "Muriel." And then there came from the staircase a tremendous knock-knock-knocking. Some one had dropped her dumbbells.
Stream of consciousness writing is a modernist technique that shows how people interpret their surroundings in a somewhat random, disjointed manner, rather than in a perfectly logical way. Since the story's point of view is third-person limited and focused on Miss Meadows's perspective, readers can infer that these lines demonstrate how Miss Meadows's interprets the world. As the sentences jump from one description to the next, invoking both images and sounds, readers get the sense early on that Miss Meadows's mental state is jumbled—an assumption that proves true, as she slowly reveals the details of her troubled engagement.
These lines also call attention to the stark difference between Miss Meadows and her students. While readers have seen Miss Meadows as full of despair and resentful of the cold weather (which reflects her own aging), the girls are "rosy" and "gleeful" on this "fine autumn morning." These lines therefore establish a key tension that pervades the rest of the story: the contrast between youth and aging.
