The Tight White Collar by Grace Metalious

George.
    â€œWell, don’t then. But it’s true just the same. Ask her if you don’t believe me. Ask him.”
    â€œYou know very well that I’d never insult either of them with such a question,” said George.
    â€œDon’t then.”
    â€œYou’re nothing but a disgusting little sneak,” said George. “I don’t know how I could ever have thought that you were sweet and pretty.”
    â€œI am sweet and pretty,” said Doris. “It’s just that I’m alone in the world and I have to look after myself.”
    George did not even glance at her as he stamped out of the room and Doris smiled and hummed as she picked up her duster and finished her work.
    For the most part, Doris had judged George Justine correctly. He could not keep away from the locked bookcase in his father’s library and now he took to coming home from Princeton almost every weekend.
    â€œHe’s a fine boy,” said Mrs. Justine. “He loves his home and his family. Why, just look. Other boys his age have nothing on their minds but carousing about every weekend and George comes home to his family.”
    But when the Justines went out on Saturday evenings, they could never get George to accompany them. He always pleaded a heavy study schedule or a headache and as soon as the family was out the front door he made his way to the library. Doris smiled and waited and as the weeks passed, a terrible anger grew in her. For if George Justine could not keep away from his father’s books, he could and did keep away from Doris.
    She smiled at him and posed in front of him and as often as possible she managed to be in the same room with him, but George never smiled back and all he ever said to her was either “Good morning, Doris” or “Good night, Doris.”
    You bastard, she thought viciously. You blue-nosed bastard. Just you wait.
    But summer arrived and George prepared to go north to Bar Harbor with his mother and sisters and Doris was still as virginal and untouched as the day she got off the boat. It was the only time her shrewdness had failed her and it was the last time in her life that she ever misjudged a man. Never again did she allow herself to become overconfident or make the mistake of overplaying her hand.
    â€œYou’ll spend the summer here,” Mrs. Justine told Doris. “You and cook and one of the other girls. And you must all take very good care of Mr. Justine. He gets very upset at times when the family is away and I want all of you to make things as pleasant as possible for him.”
    Doris had counted heavily on the summer at the shore and she almost wept with frustration. On the morning that the family left, George Justine stopped her in the hall of the second floor.
    â€œMy father knows,” he said.
    â€œKnows what?” demanded Doris.
    â€œYou know what,” whispered George angrily. “He saw one of those books in my room.”
    â€œYou’re a fool, George Justine,” said Doris.
    â€œHe knows that you know, too.”
    â€œI knew you’d tell.”
    â€œI wasn’t going to take all the blame by myself,” said George. “He asked me how I’d found out and I told him.”
    â€œIsn’t that nice,” said Doris sarcastically. “What is he going to do? Throw me out?”
    â€œI don’t know. He didn’t want to do anything until Mother and the girls had left.”
    â€œYou bastard,” whispered Doris viciously.
    George stood up straight. “You brought it all on yourself,” he said sanctimoniously. Then he turned and went downstairs to join his mother and sisters.
    Days passed and Doris waited nervously for the axe to fall, but Mr. Justine neither said nor did a thing. Toward the middle of July she began to breathe more easily and think that perhaps Mr. Justine had chosen to ignore the whole episode. But one hot night she was in her third-floor room, dressed in a