Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

I fail to understand what charms the elegant Mr. Wilkes can hold for a girl of your tempestuous nature.

vinaigrette.

cattiness.

Clammy perspiration, starting under her armpits, began to creep down her ribs.

she could recall nothing about Charles except the dying-calf look on his face when she told him she would marry him.

mésalliance

provost marshal.

through the sucking mud,

“Miss Pitty were in a state when Ah lef’ home an’ ef Ah doan git dar soon, she’ll done swooned.”

something raw and crude that appealed to the rawness and crudeness underlying the fine veneer that Ellen and Mammy had given her.

Uncle Henry liked Scarlett immediately because, he said, he could see that for all her silly affectations she had a few grains of sense.

everyone deferred gently to the opinions of others, and, in the end, the black grizzled autocrat in the kitchen had his way.

nursing was something she did simply because she didn’t know how to get out of it.

Scarlett’s was a completely feminized world and this irked her, for she neither liked nor trusted her own sex and, worse still, was always bored by it.

she had embroidered half a dozen sofa-pillow cases with the Confederate flag on them. (The stars were a bit lopsided, to be sure, some of them being almost round and others having six or even seven points, but the effect was good.)

squeals of joy as girls recognized friends from whom they had parted only that afternoon.

the red and yellow and blue stripes on the trousers, for the different branches of the service,

two of the blackest eyes she had ever seen, dancing in merciless merriment.

this despicable man who had said, and with good cause, that she was not a lady.

“How closely women clutch the very chains that bind them!

Arguments of this character were always confusing to Scarlett. His were doubly confusing because she had a vague idea there was truth in them.

A gentleman always appeared to believe a lady even when he knew she was lying. That was Southern chivalry.

But the memory was blurred, blurred by the sudden feeling of irritation that memory of him always brought to her.

She disliked him heartily, lounging there against the booth. But there was something stimulating about him,

She decided she was going to take this man down a notch or two.

There are plenty of sturdy Union patriots who are not averse to picking up money selling goods to the Confederacy.

sub rosa,

Now you are beginning to think for yourself instead of letting others think for you. That’s the beginning of wisdom.”

Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.”

What most people don’t seem to realize is that there is just as much money to be made out of the wreckage of a civilization as from the upbuilding of one.”

There, Scarlett, don’t you fret.

Scarlett was far from fretting

“Prissy, find my salts,”

It was sickening to be defended by someone you disliked so much.

“I know you. You’d be flirting at the wake of your own husband. Don’t cry.

her never-too-scrupulous sense of honor

After all, she wasn’t reading Melanie’s mail to learn Ashley’s puzzling and uninteresting ideas. She had had to listen to enough of them when he sat on the porch at Tara in days gone by.

love for Ashley was something different, having nothing to do with passion or marriage,

This informality made the war a lot of fun for Scarlett.

She was as charming a widow as she had been a girl, pleasant when she had her own way, obliging as long as it did not discommode her, vain of her looks and her popularity.

There were many things she kept from her mother these days. But, most of all, she kept secret the fact that Rhett Butler called frequently at Aunt Pittypat’s house.

he had seen her at her worst and knew the truth about Ashley. It was this knowledge that checked her tongue when he annoyed her. And he annoyed her frequently.

Frequently she flared into open wrath under his expert baiting,

“It’s almost like I was in love with him!” she thought, bewildered. “But I’m not and I just can’t understand it.”

If I am ‘nicer’ to Mrs. Wilkes, it is because she deserves it. She is one of the very few kind, sincere and unselfish persons I have ever known.

“Do you mean to say you don’t think I’m a great lady, too?” “I think we agreed on the occasion of our first meeting that you were no lady at all.”

every time the matrons of Atlanta gathered together to gossip, his reputation grew worse, which only made him all the more glamorous to the young girls.

Had he been less obviously masculine, his ability to recall details of dresses, bonnets and coiffures would have been put down as the rankest effeminacy.

He always referred to the soldiers as “our brave boys” or “our heroes in gray” and did it in such a way as to convey the utmost in insult.

abortifacients