A Dill Pickle

"A Dill Pickle" is a 1917 short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in the New Age on 4 October 1917. A revised version later appeared in Bliss and Other Stories. The characters and their relationship possibly were inspired by Mansfield's older sister Vera Margaret Beauchamp and her husband James Mackintosh Bell. A man and a woman who used to be romantically involved meet by chance in a tea-house not having seen each other for about six years. We learn that the woman ended their earlier relationship in a letter she wrote to him, but we come to doubt that she expected the letter to do so. They sit together and reminisce about past events – for example, the day they spent at Kew Gardens together. Both initially seem to regret not being friends any longer.