The Bad Seed Read Online Free PDF

my sisters and I will surely find a place for the little granddaughter of Richard Bravo.” Then, rising, she bowed and went out of the room.
    Miss Claudia, the youngest of the sisters, found what she sought in the files, and said, “So Monica Breedlove is a neighbor of yours?… At one of the carnival balls—it was the year I cameout—she stepped on my train, and pulled it off. I was so embarrassed! I went home and didn’t dare come back!”
    “Monica was the first woman in town to bob her hair,” said Miss Burgess. “And she was the first woman, at least the first respectable one, to smoke in public.”
    “When you see her,” continued Miss Claudia, “tell her I think she stepped on my train because Colonel Glass had danced with me three times that evening, and hadn’t danced with her once.”
    Christine nodded, and promised to do so; but she forgot until the morning of the picnic, when, as she approached the school, she saw Miss Claudia trailing a paper-filled burlap bag across the lawn. She smiled, remembering, and after Mrs. Breedlove had parked her car, and Rhoda had joined a group near the fig trees, she repeated Miss Claudia’s words. At once Mrs. Breedlove laughed and said she remembered perfectly.
    It had happened at the annual fancy-dress ball of the Pegasus Society, and all she’d done, really, was put the toe of her dancing slipper on poor, frowzy Claudia’s train and exert just the tiniest bit of pressure as Claudia giggled and walked away on the arm of Colonel Glass; and, as she’d expected, the train detached itself and pulled away, like something out of an old Marx Brothers movie. The trouble was that the Fern girls, in those days at least, were so hard up for ready cash that their wardrobe was a joint one—a sort of grab-bag which each felt free to use when occasion demanded it. And so they were always arranging, and rearranging, the parts of their wardrobe in different patterns, in different color contrasts, hoping to achieve somehow the illusion of freshness; but since everything was borrowed for the one occasion only, nothing was sewed firmly together, as the clothes of others were sewed; instead, everything was tied and pinned and basted hurriedly, so that it all could be taken apart the next day and used again.
    Mrs. Breedlove laughed gaily and fanned herself for a moment in silence; then she went on to say that Claudia had been quite correct in suspecting her motive. She’d done it on purpose, all right, but not because Claudia had danced three times with Colonel Glass—whom she remembered as a pompous and most tiresome man interested in fishing and the regenerative power of discipline impersonally applied—but because Claudia was making such a play for her brother Emory, and she’d determined, no matter what else happened to the Wages family, there wasn’t going to be a disarranged, cowlike Claudia Fern in it!
    The two busses were drawn up to the curb, and already some of the children had taken their places. Mrs. Breedlove, looking about her, called to Rhoda, and when the child joined her, she said, “Where is the little Daigle boy, the one who won the penmanship medal? Has he arrived? I haven’t seen him.”
    “There he is,” said Rhoda. “Standing there at the gate.”
    The boy was pale and remarkably thin, with a long, wedge-shaped face, and a full, pink underlip that puckered with an inappropriate sensuousness. His mother stood possessively beside him—an intense woman with protruding eyes. She plucked anxiously at her passive son, adjusting his cap, smoothing his tie, fiddling with his socks, or dabbing at his face with a handkerchief. He was wearing the penmanship medal pinned to the pocket of his shirt, and his mother, as if knowing somehow that the medal was being discussed, put her arm nervously about his shoulders and lifted the medal in her palm as though it were she, and not her son, who had won it.
    Mrs. Breedlove said to Rhoda in an amused, coaxing voice,