Gone With The Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

She was a tall woman, standing a head higher than her fiery little husband, but she moved with such quiet grace in her swaying hoops that the height attracted no attention to itself.

There was a steely quality under her stately gentleness that awed the whole household,

Mother had always been just as she was, a pillar of strength, a fount of wisdom, the one person who knew the answers to everything.

“I wish to Heaven I was married,” she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. “I’m tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I’m tired of acting like I don’t eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I’m tired of saying, ‘How wonderful you are!’ to fool men who haven’t got one-half the sense I’ve got, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they’re doing it.

When trouble comes we bow to the inevitable without any mouthing, and we work and we smile and we bide our time.

And apologies, once postponed, became harder and harder to make, and finally impossible.

“I loved something I made up, something that’s just as dead as Melly is.

But, Scarlett, did it ever occur to you that even the most deathless love could wear out?”

“But I’m too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over. I’m too old to shoulder the burden of constant lies that go with living in polite disillusionment. I couldn’t live with you and lie to you and I certainly couldn’t lie to myself. I can’t even lie to you now. I wish I could care what you do or where you go, but I can’t.”