The Bad Seed

by William March

For another, broadened expectations for women and girls mean that, for better or worse, we are seen as more fully realized human beings, not cartoonish ciphers that either adhere to or reject conventional ideas about what females are capable of.

then she smiled at some secret thought of her own, and at once there was a shallow dimple in her left cheek.

Rhoda submitted to the caress with that tolerant but withdrawn patience of the pet that can never be quite domesticated;

But in this he was mistaken, as we shall see in time, for Rhoda was able to put into action the things that he could only turn over in his mind as fantasies.

Foreshadowing

while we advocate the democratic ideal, we are convinced that such an ideal is possible only where all members of a particular group come from the same level of society, preferably a high one.”

The child lives in her own particular world, and I’m sure it isn’t anything at all like the world you and I live in.”

It seemed to her suddenly that violence was an inescapable factor of the heart, perhaps the most important factor of all—an ineradicable thing that lay, like a bad seed, behind kindness, behind compassion, behind the embrace of love itself.

She got up suddenly and walked about her apartment, arranging and rearranging her belongings without conscious thought, as though her actions were merely the outward mechanics of an inward turbulence she could not so easily arrange. She