leelee2525: Famously, Mansfield remarked 'risk, risk everything'." I find this to be rather interesting since the two sisters in the short story "D of the LC" are anything but risk-takers.This puts me in mind of a question. Do you think the story's view of the sisters is more sympathetic or contemptuous? Because it strikes me that Mansfield could have felt either way, on the one hand, understanding the pressures that might have resulted in their timidity, and on the other, having wriggled free of so many social constraints herself.What has that got to do with the short story? I think it has a lot to do with a person's role in society and how even into the twentieth century those roles were pretty ironclad.Having that information in mind also makes Con and Jug's social position more complicated. On the one hand, they are trapped by their reliance on Kate and their prior reliance on their father. On the other, they live a very easy life built on the hardship of people who they can only imagine romantically. And that strikes me as a pretty tenuous balance.