As the story begins, Laura’s upper class family is holding a garden party. We watch the interaction between her family and the servants and other working people as they prepare for the party; we see how their world is carefully ordered (”The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine.”) When a group of workmen come to set up a marquee for the party, Laura finds herself drawn to them, and it showed how giddy Laura is (”Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought. Why couldn’t she have workmen for her friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came to Sunday night supper? She would get on much better with men like these.”) Laura also has no use for “stupid convention” or “absurd class distinctions,” or at least that is what she tells herself.
