Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

The Cause didn’t seem sacred to her. The war didn’t seem to be a holy affair, but a nuisance that killed men senselessly and cost money and made luxuries hard to get.

“They both see the same unpleasant truth, but Rhett likes to look it in the face and enrage people by talking about it—and Ashley can hardly bear to face it.” It was very bewildering.

“Starving’s not pleasant,” he said. “I know for I’ve starved, but I’m not afraid of that. I am afraid of facing life without the slow beauty of our old world that is gone.”

She could not ignore life. She had to live it and it was too brutal, too hostile, for her even to try to gloss over its harshness with a smile.

Bright lights and wine, fiddles and dancing, brocade and broadcloth in the showy big houses and, just around the corners, slow starvation and cold. Arrogance and callousness for the conquerors, bitter endurance and hatred for the conquered.

“Death and taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them!”

“Did you ever hear the Oriental proverb: ‘The dogs bark but the caravan passes on’? Let them bark, Scarlett. I fear nothing will stop your caravan.”

“You are my boy, aren’t you?” “Can you be—well, two men’s boy?” questioned Wade, loyalty to the father he had never known struggling with love for the man who held him so understandingly. “Yes,” said Rhett firmly. “Just like you can be your mother’s boy and Aunt Melly’s, too.” Wade digested this statement. It made sense to him and he smiled and wriggled against Rhett’s arm shyly.

“I never understood you before. I never understood why I wasn’t altogether happy either. But—why, we are talking like old people talk!” she thought with dreary surprise. “Old people looking back fifty years. And we’re not old! It’s just that so much has happened in between. Everything’s changed so much that it seems like fifty years ago. But we’re not old!”

“We had fine notions then, didn’t we?” And then, with a rush, “Oh, Ashley, nothing has turned out as we expected!” “It never does,” he said. “Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it’s no worse than it is.”

Oh, to be with her own kind of people again, those people who had been through the same things and knew how they hurt—and yet how great a part of you they were!

Yes, Melanie had been there that day with a sword in her small hand, ready to do battle for her. And now, as Scarlett looked sadly back, she realized that Melanie had always been there beside her with a sword in her hand, unobtrusive as her own shadow, loving her, fighting for her with blind passionate loyalty, fighting Yankees, fire, hunger, poverty, public opinion and even her beloved blood kin.

Now, she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him. She wondered forlornly if she had ever really understood anyone in the world.