The Possibility of Evil

“She was seventy-one, Miss Strangeworth told the tourists, with a pretty little dimple showing by her lip, and she sometimes found herself thinking that the town belonged to her.” 

It is significant that Miss Strangeworth’s lengthiest conversations are with tourists rather than with townspeople. It suggests that she depends on outsiders, who do not know her ways and who think of her as merely a sweet, perhaps slightly eccentric old woman. The townspeople are more intimately acquainted with her belief that the town belongs to her and understand it not to be a joke.

“Miss Strangeworth never gave away any of her roses, although the tourists often asked her. The roses belonged on Pleasant Street, and it bothered Miss Strangeworth to think of people wanting to carry them away, to take them into strange towns and down strange streets.”

Miss Strangeworth sees her roses as both a private asset and a public one; they are an integral part of her home décor, but they also represent her town. They show her old-fashioned conception of herself as local royalty who must keep up appearances for her own sake and for the sake of her subjects. The frequent mention of Miss Strangeworth’s roses foreshadows the story’s end, when the roses are destroyed.

“They had been in high school together, and had gone to picnics together, and to high school dances and basketball games, but now Mr. Lewis was behind the counter in the grocery, and Miss Strangeworth was living alone in the Strangeworth house on Pleasant Street.” 

This passage, detailing how class differences eventually disrupted Mr. Lewis and Miss Strangeworth’s casual friendship, suggests that Miss Strangeworth was once a different person. It suggests that her gradual awareness of her social status might have contributed to her strangeness and isolation. As such, there is a poignancy to the line about her living alone in her house on Pleasant Street; Miss Strangeworth considers this a mark of her superiority, but the reader understands it to be a kind of prison.