The second verse that Maria skips is

I dreamt that suitors sought my hand, That knights upon bended knee And with vows no maidens heart could withstand, They pledged their faith to me. And I dreamt that one of that noble host Came forth my hand to claim. But I also dreamt which charmed me most That you loved me still the same

I don't really get this here -- was Maria not supposed to have played the game? Was it an honest mistake the next-door girl made or was the clay left out with malicious intent?

Here, although Maria's story is very different than that of the other women of Dubliners (no big decision to make, no disappointing life trajectory), I see shades of the disappointment and letdown that color all those other stories.

It's just something about the dissonance between her purported goodheartedness and so on and so forth and what she actually experiences life to be: full of tiny letdowns and blunders.

Polly's also got green eyes, like many other characters in The Dubliners.

See -- I could be reading too much into things here, but these lines do make me think that Joyce is alluding to Mrs. Mooney actually prostituting her daughter.

The characterization of a "little perverse madonna" could certainly be said of a young sex worker, and the fact that there's always some shifty character circling around the boardinghouse asking to spend time alone with Polly? Not a good look.

Call-back to Mr. Mooney chasing his wife with a cleaver. Seems there's something about cycles of violence here?

Yikes -- being called the Madam in a boardinghouse. Not sure if this is an ahistorical reading but this nickname makes me think Mrs. Mooney's prostituting Polly.

Reminds me of the paralysis from the "The Sisters," although in my mind, Eveline's affliction isn't really the inability to act so much as it is the hyperactivity of her thought. She spends so much time waffling between chasing the future with Frank and luxuriating in a more content past with her mother and brother that when the time for action comes, she's frozen on the spot with all the possibilities. Actually reminds me a bit of Jug and Con from "Daughters of the Late Colonel," now that I think about it.

A similarity I'm noticing between Mansfield and Joyce -- a lot of these stories are about (if not on the face, then at their core) disappointment. Nothing in life is as exciting or fulfilling as the thought of that thing -- not marriage, not parties, not adventures, not securing a trinket for your crush. Wonder if that's related to some Modernist sensibility?

Is there something going on with Mangan's sister being a "brown figure" and calling Araby a bazaar and the foreign feeling of being besotted? I wonder if there's anything else to this sentiment besides the exoticism and new-ness of love.

I see this story and "The Sisters" as something of a natural pair.

Our main characters are both young men who encounter creepy older men who are ranters and ravers.

Interesting that our narrator is obviously a bit obsessed with the words that began this story (paralysis, gnomon -- the l-shaped part of a parallelogram left when a similar parallelogram has been taken from its corner; the sticky-outty part of a sundial, simony) but no mention of the gnomon here.

Someone mentioned the parent child dynamics flipping earlier, and it's seen really clearly here. Instead of Mr. Neave calling his children for dinner, they call him in for dinner instead. He's switched from being the keeper to the kept, and the lurch is getting to him.

The passionflower was first discovered in Latin America and was named by Roman Catholic priests of the late 16th century named it for the Passion (suffering and death) of Jesus Christ. Apparently, they saw the passionflower's five petals and five sepals representing the 10 faithful apostles, and the hairlike rays of the flower as reminiscent of a crown of thorns.

I don't know about all the Christ imagery, since Mansfield's work has been fairly secular so far, but I do think that Mr. Neave is preoccupied with death and suffering.

All this from here!l.

From the internet, the guinea was a coin minted in Great Britain between 1663 and 1814. Seems quite a bit before even Mansfield's time, huh.

Reminds me of the zoetrope, which was a sort of proto-animation device invented and popularized in the 19th century.

Helps me understand one of the recurring motifs in this short story of the ball as distortion -- the whirling of dancing, the dazzling lights, the disconcerting lurch between wishing desperately to be back home or jubilant that you are exactly where you are. I get Leila's back and forth.

Apparently, azaleas mean "take care of yourself for me." Seems a fitting flower for a story about an older man telling a young woman that her time will be over before she knows it.

Seems like Leila is the naive, inexperienced girl to the Sheridans' worldly womanhood. Explains her rose-colored view of the ball.

I can't help but read into some deeper meaning here. Someone's already mentioned the significance of Titania, but there's something to be said about the intertextuality between A Midsummer's Night Dream and some of the events of this short story.

For instance, in A Midsummer's Night Dream, one of the themes is the darkness/blindness of love. Titania falls in love with a donkey after fairies paint a love potion over her eyes. There's also a contrast drawn between lovers' bliss and doom/tragedy/discontent of other mythical couples like Pyramus and Thisbe. There's the same sort of double narrative going on in Marriage a la mode, where things are not always as they seem.

Here we see this totally radical re-reading of Isabel, like Mansfield almost completely changes tacks. Before, I sympathized with William as a guy overrun by his modern wife and her newfangled tendencies, but this self-awareness from Isabel actually says more about William's refusal to adapt than about her zeal.

Carnations are also what upset Laura's mother in the Garden Party.

Carnations represent remembrance of a loved one, among other things. Wonder if there's a deeper significance here?

Now that we're learning more about the sisters' backgrounds and their relationship to their father, their mother's death -- just generally how they became to be the shy, skittish creatures that even sort of fear their maid's confidence -- I have to say, I get why they're so firmly latched onto Cyril.

I don't think Mansfield limits herself to the eye dialects of the working class. Here I really felt the old Colonel's inflection.

It took me until now to realize that Jug is Constance's nickname for her sister. What a pleasantly everyday and down-to-earth sound/object/nickname for a rich girl like Josephine to have.

It's interesting that the widow's sister seems so determined to be Laura's tour guide to poverty, suffering, and grief. I wonder if it just appears that way or it actually is.

Interpreting Laura/the narrator's preference for nature over human creation symbolically. Even from this little comment, I'm wondering how this idea might subvert the traditional garden party?

This place/history is real! Somnath is a temple city on the western coast of Gujarat.

In 1842, Edward Law, 1st Earl of Ellenborough issued his Proclamation of the Gates, in which he ordered the British army in Afghanistan to return via Ghazni and bring back to India the sandalwood gates from the tomb of Mahmud of Ghazni in Ghazni, Afghanistan. These were believed to have been taken by Mahmud from Somnath.

It turns out the gates weren't real (they were made not from sandalwood, but wood endemic to Ghazni), but all the hullabaloo likely inspired Collins on the fantastical origins of the Moonstone. There was even a Parliamentary debate in 1842 about what to do with the retrieved "Somnath" gates.

Did some googling and apparently "coming of age" legally in 1870s England likely meant 21. Interesting because I thought Rachel/Franklin/Godfrey were all a bit older.

That said, Google also said women in the 1870s married at an average of 26 and men, 28, which makes Godfrey's desperate marital shopping seem even more alarming.

This idiom is the originator of the phrase "to come clean," which was popularized in the United States in the early 1900s.

Interesting that we almost shift into the second person here. The narrative device of having the reader inhabit a character in a state they themselves don't remember is almost cinematic and very psychological thriller-y.

This is interesting to me -- there's so much that an author can do with an unreliable narrator, especially in a mystery novel with an addict narrator (thinking about the CBS iteration of Elementary where they retcon Holmes as an addict instead of just a casual user). But as far as I've noticed, Ezra doesn't show any of the cognitive or emotional symptoms of addiction, which would probably impair his observational skills.

I did think that Betteredge's reaction to Ezra's not having read Crusoe since he was a kid a bit funky:

He fell back a few steps, and looked at me with an expression of compassionate curiosity, tempered by superstitious awe.

It's almost like his previous derision is replaced with the paternalistic desire to reform/educate?

I don't think I've heard Betteredge be quite so abrasive thus far. I wonder if that's because all the other narrators we've heard from have been nobility or guests of the Verinders'? And even though Betteredge is giving Ezra a piece of his mind here, Franklin Blake's in clear earshot?

We chatted earlier in Zulip about how Bruff is slang for a jolly ol' fellow, and somebody wrote that they hadn't exactly pictured Mr. Bruff as Santa-like, but this description paints the picture for me!

Not sure if this is the right reference, but this is what I could find on Wikipedia.

Grog is, given the time frame, likely a 4:1 combination of water to rum. After English conquest of Jamaica, rum replaced beer/brandy as the alcohol of choice for sailors (fresh water grows algae), who often diluted alcohol with water to prevent drunkenness. Fun fact -- The Royal Navy had grog rations written into its regulations for more than 2 centuries (1756-1970).

A little weird that this seafaring and historically gross-sounding drink is Franklin Blake's beverage of choice!

To this point -- I still don't really get what the Shivering Sand physically is. Is it quicksand? Is it a concealed sinkhole?

Metaphorically, though, "shivering sands" is a super evocative phrase to me. It makes me thinks of desert mirages and visions like that, which kind of makes sense for a detective novel where there are all of these conflicting veiled references and possibilities presented to the reader.

This description is almost completely incongruous with Betteredge's description of Limping Lucy.

Bating her lame foot and her leanness (this last a horrid draw-back to a woman, in my opinion), the girl had some pleasing qualities in the eye of a man. A dark, keen, clever face, and a nice clear voice, and a beautiful brown head of hair counted among her merits. A crutch appeared in the list of her misfortunes. And a temper reckoned high in the sum total of her defects.

What a sinister way to open.

So Rachel is keeping a secret about the diamond, but she's open that she's keeping a secret? I think before, she's just been a bit cagey or refused to tell people that she doesn't know or doesn't like, but refusing to tell Franklin Blake is a little weird when they're so apparently close.

It's interesting that up to this point, every narrator has sort of referenced the inherent mystique of the Indian trio as the inexplicable habits of foreigners, so it's difficult to read Collins' true thoughts/opinions on nonwhite British subjects. But Mr. Murthwaite here shows a self-awareness here that part of what makes things strange and mystical are the customs and habits of the English mind, which makes me think Collins is more openminded than some of his more vocal characters.

Super lawyerly to frame Lady Verinder's death as a "sentence." Interesting to consider the ramifications of doctors who are "judging" health... makes me think that Bruff thinks that the doctors consigned Lady Verinder to die?

You can tell from Bruff's narration that he's a lawyer -- not just in the content of his narration (wills, properties, etc) but from his tone. There's none of Betteredge's tangents or Miss Clack's moralizing.

Interesting that Miss Clack fixates on how Ablewhite isn't as impassioned by charity as he seems with no mention of her obvious enamoring with him, despite his longing after Rachel. A complicated web! I wonder if past/present romantic jealousy is part of why the cousins don't get along.

Miss Clack takes proselytizing to comical new heights.

I'm sensing something of a shift here -- heretofore, Miss Clack has solely hated Rachel, but now she seems to have less than stellar opinions of Lady Verinder as well. I wonder what's changed?

This cracks me up. I'm sure Collins is saying something about the hypocritical moralizing of devout Christianity, since Miss Clack makes pointed references to her choices to take the higher road but never ceases to make her judgements of the characters she doesn't like clear to readers.

Seems Miss Clack doesn't think Blake could ever be the purposeful target of crime. Wonder if she's mistaken and that he did indeed do something uncharacteristically nefarious that explains why he was targeted.

I wonder if it's just me or if the diction here is uptight even for the era and made to characterize Miss Clack.

The Robinson Crusoe intertextuality is so interesting to me. To me, RC and Betteredge have nothing in common as characters, which is exactly what makes Betteredge's fascination with the novel/character so particular to me, but I think there are some hidden depths I'm missing here. There's definitely something about Christian morals in common, and maybe something about British imperialism? But other than that, I'm not sure.

Cuff is obsessed with roses, and I think the Rosanna-rose relationship is clear here. Wonder if this is a bit of foreshadowing that Rosanna didn't steal the diamond?

I wonder if this is our first red herring? Not sure if it counts since I'm not personally convinced that Rosanna is the thief, but there is something to be said here about the depth/breadth Collins has Cuff elaborate on his theory and its viability

I see a lot of people noting how the narrator tends to almost over-narrate, as in, narrate about his narration (e.g., "Now I am going to talk about this," "I am going to pause to expound on that," etc). I wonder how much of what we're chalking up to the narrator's "voice"--people have mentioned grandfatherliness--is actually just a necessity of serialization, to remind the reader exactly what's going on.