Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

She could not make inquiries among the servants for news of him. But she felt they knew something she did not know. Negroes always knew everything.

“Well, you are both hard-headed business women and both successful. Belle’s got the edge on you, of course, because she’s a kind-hearted, good-natured soul—”

“If you were a man, I would break your neck for that. As it is, all I can say is for you to shut your God-damn mouth.

With one of the few adult emotions Scarlett had ever had, she realized that to unburden her own tortured heart would be the purest selfishness.

vexed

Melanie had all that passionate clan loyalty peculiar to Georgians and the thought of a family quarrel tore her heart.

She stuck by Scarlett’s side like a cocklebur.

Pitty was always swayed more by considerations of personal comfort than by moral issues.

Pitty loved Melanie better than anyone in the world, except herself,

everyone was like a child to Melanie.

Melanie had never seen evil, never seen cruelty, and now that she looked on them for the first time she found them too inconceivable to believe.

He was so very large and male, and excessively male creatures always discomposed her.

People had said he was brutal and sneering and bad mannered and even dishonest.

one of Ashley’s unselfish temperament goes about the world doing so many good deeds that you can’t expect him to remember all of them.”

while at Tara she had decided that never again would she permit herself to be involved in any quarrel with Rhett about Ashley.

I told him that he knew as well as I did that you couldn’t bear not to have your finger in everybody’s pie, and if you sold out to him, then you wouldn’t be able to tell him how to mind his own business.”

Well, how did I get the money to make it possible? Off trees? No, sir! Convicts and saloon rentals and—” “And don’t forget murdering that Yankee,” said Rhett softly. “He really gave you your start.”

Sometimes men came home with him in the late hours and sat talking in the dining room around the brandy decanter. They were not the same men with whom he had drunk the first year they were married. No rich Carpetbaggers, no Scallawags, no Republicans came to the house now at his invitation.

“No Klan? Are you lying to try to soothe me?” “My dear, when did I ever try to soothe you? No, there is no Klan now.

“Yes, platitudinously but truly, politics make strange bedfellows.

“How you do run on,”

As she looked about her, that Christmas of 1871,

She is 26 years old now, maybe 27. She was 16 when the story began in April 1861.

When the devil drove, Mammy could be as swift as a lithe black sixteen-year-old and her curiosity to get into Rhett’s room made her work faster.

apologies, once postponed, become harder and harder to make, and finally impossible.

For now, even Mammy, her mainstay, had gone back to Tara. Gone permanently.

“Look ter me lak Miss Ellen say ter me: ‘Mammy, come home. Yo’ wuk done finish.’ So Ah’s gwine home.”

“She hasn’t your strength. She’s never had any strength. She’s never had anything but heart.”

India staring at her, grief stricken and without hate.

“Now, Miss,” he whispered briefly, “no hysterics and no deathbed confessions from you or, before God, I will wring your neck! Don’t give me any of your innocent stares. You know what I mean. Miss Melly is going to die easily and you aren’t going to ease your conscience by telling her anything about Ashley. I’ve never harmed a woman yet, but if you say anything now—you’ll answer to me.”

desolate with the knowledge that she could not face life without the terrible strength of the weak, the gentle, the tender hearted.

Yet, there the truth was. He did not love her and she did not care. She did not care because she did not love him.

“He never really existed at all, except in my imagination,”

“I loved something I made up,

What I’ve wished for so often has happened. I’ve wished Melly was dead so I could have him. And now she’s dead and I’ve got him and I don’t want him.

her footsteps were as noiseless as a dream.

This IS her dream.

I think you are still a child. No one but a child could be so headstrong and so insensitive.”

knowing you as you really are—hard and greedy and unscrupulous,

You’ve never been very soothing, my dear.”

“How old are you, my dear? You never would tell me.” “Twenty-eight,”

Pity! Kindness! “Oh, my God,” she thought despairingly. Anything but pity and kindness. Whenever she felt these two emotions for anyone, they went hand in hand with contempt.

I’m forty-five—the age when a man begins to value some of the things he’s thrown away so lightly in youth,

the calm dignity life can have when it’s lived by gentle folks,

she sensed in him something strong, unyielding, implacable—all the qualities she had looked for in Ashley and never found.