The New Penguin Guide to the Law

Pie Harralson, the girl-wife-ChiOmega-Junior-Leaguer, wields an unhealthy sort of attraction over her father, a beefy, choleric man from the "wire grass south." Pie seems quite aware that her husband, Buddy, makes a triangle with her at the apex and daddy at one of the lower corners. She plays the two of them off one another. The house itself is only another pawn in the love-hate-love affairs she seems to be having with her father ("That weird thing she has with him," one character says dismissively). Near the end of her first conversation with Colquitt and Walter, Pie says gleefully: "Oh, Daddy's just going to hate this house! Oh, he's going to be fit to be tied!БЂ«Buddy, meanwhile, has been taken under the wing of Lucas Abbott, a new arrival at the law office where Buddy works. Abbott is a Northerner, and we hear passingly that Abbott left New York as the result of a scandal: ". . . something about a law clerk.БЂ«The house next door, which turns people's own deepest weaknesses against them, as Siddons says, fuses these elements neatly and horribly ...»