A Child’s World

Oh, to live in a room filled with the objects described by Katherine Mansfield. To arrange her combs, playing cards, and enamel boxes, to try on “the most amusing orange coat with a procession of black monkeys round the hem.” This would be joy enough, but why limit ourselves? In the kitchen, our hostess has lined the counters with cream puffs, chocolate custard, champagne, almond fingers and “some yellow pears, smooth as silk.” Love her, as Virginia Woolf did (“the only writing I have ever been jealous of ”), or dislike her, as Virginia Woolf did (of her odor: “like a civet cat that had taken to street walking”), no writer has made quotidian treasures spring off the page quite like Katherine Mansfield.