Something Childish But Very Natural is a 1914 short story by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and...

. It was first published posthumously in the Adelphi, though it was written in 1914.

Plot summary

At a train station, Henry looks at books and comes upon Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem. Then he jumps onto the train as he is late, and has left his portfolio behind. On the train, he starts talking to a girl, until she tells him she will be there again every evening. On the following Saturday, he goes to the station and sees her; they get on the train and start talking like old friends.
Later, they go to a concert, and she appears somewhat distant. They walk down the streets of London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 and come upon a pretty village nearby. There, they visit a house and decide to rent it. Then Henry receives a telegram, and things fall apart.

Characters

• Henry. He is almost 18 years old and works in an architect's office.
• Edna. She is 16 years old and goes to a training college to be a secretary. Her mother is Hungarian.

Major themes

• Love
• Chance
• The transitional period between childhood and adolescence
• The tension between fantasy and reality

Literary significance

The text is written in the modernist mode, without a set structure, and with many shifts in the narrative.