Despite the recent increase in interest and important studies devoted to Katherine Mansfield, her short stories have t yet been given the recognition they deserve. In a limited way the present study aims at contributing to fill in a gap in the history of twentieth-century English literature by situating Mansfield's work within the aesthetic framework of the - trace -. It presents the reader with a contradictory decoding of the stories, the density and complexity of which must pass unticed, precisely because this is the way they are written. It thus considers Mansfield's art as an art of reticence.