But still one must go everywhere one must see everything. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of the revolting language and of what they might catch. Washerwomen lived in the lane and sweeps and a cobbler, and a man whose house-front was studded all over with minute bird-cages. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans' chimneys. The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. In the garden patches there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans. They were little mean dwellings painted a chocolate brown. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all. The little cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise that led up to the house. Upon seeing Scott’s body, Laura has an epiphany about life, death, wealth and poverty (although the reader never quite learns what exactly she has figured out). When she arrives, Laura is unsettled by the cottages’ squalid conditions and overwhelmed with anxiety about her own wealth, especially the hat and clothes that make her class status obvious. Later, Laura’s mother sends her to deliver a basket of leftover food to the cart-driver’s family.
When Laura overhears that Scott has died in a horrible accident, she urges the rest of her family to cancel the party, but her protests fall on deaf ears and she decides to go on with the party once she sees herself in the mirror wearing her mother’s extravagant daisy-trim hat. Laura’s mother calls her “the artistic one” and sends her to do various odd jobs in preparation for the garden party that afternoon, but as Laura increasingly realizes that working-class people in her community must work tirelessly and endure poverty in order for her family to maintain their extravagant lifestyle, she becomes increasingly torn between the leisurely gentility of her upbringing and her sympathy for the workers her parents and siblings barely acknowledge. She is disappointed, for example, by the “silly boys” courting her rather than “extraordinarily nice” men from the lower classes, like the workmen who put up the marquee. As she begins to come of age, Laura starts to realize the pitfalls of her privileged upbringing, especially the restrictions it places on socializing. Sheridan’s teenage daughter and sister to Laurie, Jose and Meg. The story’s curious and free-spirited protagonist, Laura is Mr.
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