Miss Strangeworth takes pride in knowing everyone in town. She takes pride in the fact that her family has been in this town for generations. She wants people to know (even tourists) that she knows everyone in town. This is ironic considering her practice of sending anonymous letters. However, she writes anonymously to avoid consequences or rebuttals.
She greets everyone in town in order to gather information about them. She presents herself as a caring, considerate neighbor. She engages all the people she meets with kindness but she also has an ulterior motive. She's looking for faults and flaws. She feels it is her duty to find flaws and make people aware of them (via her anonymous letters). This duty might come from a legitimate desire to encourage morals among her fellow citizens. But her letters are rude and hardly constructive. The narrator notes "as long as evil existed unchecked in the world, it was Miss Strangeworth’s duty to keep her town alert to it." She greets everyone so that she can have material for her letters.
For example, she greets Helen Crane and is friendly in conversation. But when she gets home, she sends a letter implying that Helen's baby is an "idiot child" and that some people shouldn't have children. She sends this to Don, Helen's husband. This is the letter she drops, thus revealing to Don and Helen that she has been writing the letters.
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