Sentence No. 134 · 8 August 2026
She was like a person so dazed by the horror of what has happened that he walks away—anywhere, as though by walking away he could escape
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories
Katherine Mansfield — The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
Notice how the sentence pivots on the em dash after 'away': the dash introduces an appositive ('anywhere') that clarifies where he walks, and the following comma launches a subordinate 'as though' clause. Dashes and 'as though' almost always introduce what follows, never end a thought.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 8 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. A weary woman searches the streets for a private moment. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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