The majority of the characters in this story—including the Burnell daughters, their parents, their aunt, and their friends—are of the social elite and pride themselves on their superior status. The Kelvey girls, however, are from a lower class and are banned from associating with the other girls because of this. Even the schoolteacher treats the Kelvey girls differently from her other students. Mansfield writes,

The line had to be drawn somewhere. It was drawn at the Kelveys. Many of the children, including the Burnells, were not allowed even to speak to them. They walked past the Kelveys with their heads in the air, and as they set the fashion in all matters of behaviour, the Kelveys were shunned by everybody. Even the teacher had a special voice for them, and a special smile for the other children when Lil Kelvey came up to her desk with a bunch of dreadfully common-looking flowers.

The Kelvey girls’ low social and economic status is reflected in the fact that they are banned from associating with the other girls and seeing the dollhouse.

While the impoverished Kelvey girls are presented as humble and innocent, the members of higher social classes are presented as excessively cold-hearted: both Aunt Beryl and the schoolgirls feel joyful after insulting the Kelveys. The Kelvey girls, especially as they reflect “dreamily” on the dollhouse at the end, demonstrate an innocence and goodness that the other characters of the story do not. By repeatedly presenting the Kelvey girls in a sympathetic light, especially by calling Else Kelvey “our Else,” Mansfield invites the reader to identify with the Kelveys and experience the evils of upper-class prejudice.

Mansfield implies that discriminatory attitudes and behaviors against lower-class people are perpetuated in society by being passed from one generation to the next. From a young age, the children in this story reflect their parents’ arrogance and discrimination against people of lower classes.

While the Burnell parents are not the main characters in this story, their attitudes are still made clear: the narrator explicitly states that the school Isabel, Lottie, and Kezia attend “was not at all the kind of place their parents would have chosen if there had been any choice”; it is simply the only school in the area. The parents’ dismay stems from the fact that children from all different classes attend this school: “all the children of the neighbourhood, the Judge’s little girls, the doctor’s daughters, the store-keeper’s children, the milkman’s, were forced to mix together.” This prejudice is one that is passed down to their children, who are expected to walk past the Kelvey girls “with their heads in the air.” Discrimination against lower classes is not only encouraged but enforced: at the end of the story, Aunt Beryl scolds Kezia harshly for inviting the Kelveys over, calling her a “wicked, disobedient little girl!” It is ironic that in this story, Kezia’s disobedience to her parents in inviting the Kelveys to see the dollhouse is, in fact, the moral thing to do.