One type of conflict in the story is external. The morning of the garden party, a working-class man named Scott who lives nearby with his wife and five children is killed in an accident. Laura, the "artistic" daughter of the upper-class Sheridan family giving the party, feels that they should cancel it out of respect for the man's sudden death. She believes it is the only decent thing to do. The rest of her family, however, is horrified at the idea. The lilies and eclairs have arrived, it is a beautiful day, the sandwiches are made, and everyone is looking forward to the pleasures ahead.
Laura then faces an internal conflict: much as she believes it would show respect to the dead man and his family to cancel the frivolous festivities in light of the tragedy , her mother seduces her into wanting to go ahead with the party by...
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giving her a beautiful hat. Laura sees herself in the mirror and realizes she will look so pretty in it at the party that she wavers:
There, quite by chance, the first thing she saw was this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long black velvet ribbon. Never had she imagined she could look like that. Is mother right [that they should have the party]? she thought.
Laura's desire to do the right thing conflicts with her desire for pleasure. She realizes that her own enjoyment will be spoiled if the party is cancelled, so she capitulates.
The thematic conflict is that between the classes. The story shows that the upper classes are not willing to sacrifice their power, pleasure, and privilege in the slightest degree for the lower classes. The rich are quick to rationalize what they want to do. Much as people like Laura might want to believe there are no real class differences, all the details of her life and those of her working-class neighbors reveal how wide the gulf is. To bring some measure of social equality to the working class would require the rich to give up their pleasures, and they are not willing to do that.
Conflicts in the story are both internal and external. Once conflict concerns Laura and her family ("man against man"). She wants to learn life from their point of view; she wants to be like them. She admires her mother and her brother enormously, but learning to be like them is not easy for her and she often stumbles, as she does when speaking to the workmen. This event pertains the larger class conflict (man vs. man) that provides the background to the story, the conflict between the life of comfort of the family and life of hardship of the people in the village; it is that difference in class, and the inability of one class to understand the other, that Mansfield wants to expose. This leads to the internal conflict for the protagonist, for during this party she learns about life and death (man vs. nature), and the weight of that knowledge is staggering. Her entire background conflicts with the poverty and experience of death that she encounters when she visits the family in the village, and when the story ends, she is not able to resolve it. She comes close to understanding the meaning of death, but it finally eludes her when her brother can only say "Isn't it darling" as she cries to express her feelings.