The visible world in her stories both conceals and discloses layers of emotion, often in the same phrase or the same sentence. She uses details as hidden implications. She never forces a thing or an object to stand for a feeling, or allows it to have more resonance than tact will permit. Rather, she lets what her characters notice console them and distract them, while also allowing the reader to understand and know what is, for the moment, being sidelined or ignored. Mansfield has a way of hovering before she swoops so that the hovering becomes her great subject and the swooping is often ungainly and oddly pointless, or much too late. The prey has moved on, or changed its shape.