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Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia?
Now he saw that she understood entirely too well and he felt the usual masculine indignation at the duplicity of women. Added to it was the usual masculine disillusionment in discovering that a woman has a brain.
She knew, by now, that Rhett loved to take her down a peg, and would spoil her fun whenever he could, if she lent an attentive ear to his jibes. Should she take him seriously, she would be forced to quarrel with him and she did not care to match swords, for she always came off second best. So she hardly ever listened to anything he said, and what she was forced to hear she tried to turn off as a joke. At least, she tried for a while.
But scarcely had they moved into the new house and Scarlett gathered her new friends about her, when sudden sharp quarrels sprang up between them. They were brief quarrels, short lived because it was impossible to keep a quarrel going with Rhett, who remained coolly indifferent to her hot words and waited his chance to pink her in an unguarded spot. She quarreled; Rhett did not. He only stated his unequivocal opinion of herself, her actions, her house and her new friends. And some of his opinions were of such a nature that she could no longer ignore them and treat them as jokes.
Easy come, easy go. Their money won’t do them any good. Any more than my money has done you any good. It certainly hasn’t made a horse out of you yet, has it, my pretty mule?” The quarrel which sprang from this last remark lasted for days. After the fourth day of Scarlett’s sulks and obvious silent demands for an apology, Rhett went to New Orleans, taking Wade with him, over Mammy’s protests, and he stayed away until Scarlett’s tantrum had passed. But the sting of not humbling him remained with her.
“Can you forget what these people did to us? Can you forget darling Charlie dead and Ashley’s health ruined and Twelve Oaks burned? Oh, Scarlett, you can’t forget that terrible man you shot with your mother’s sewing box in his hands! You can’t forget Sherman’s men at Tara and how they even stole our underwear! And tried to burn the place down and actually handled my father’s sword! Oh, Scarlett, it was these same people who robbed us and tortured us and left us to starve that you invited to your party! The same people who have set the darkies up to lord it over us, who are robbing us and
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“Do you think I’m a fool?” she questioned impatiently. “Of course, I remember! But all that’s past, Melly. It’s up to us to make the best of things and I’m trying to do it. Governor Bullock and some of the nicer Republicans can help us a lot if we handle them right.”
“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.”
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. She would be ridding herself of her burden and laying it on the heart of an innocent and trusting person.
You don’t believe me but it’s all true and I’m a dog. Do you know why I did it? I was mad, crazy with jealousy. She never cared for me and I thought I could make her care. But she never cared. She doesn’t love me. She never has. She loves—”
“Not a change of heart at all. Merely a change of hide. You might possibly sponge the spots off a leopard but he’d remain a leopard, just the same.”
Rhett had spoken of Belle Watling the day he cried with his head on her knees. But he loved Scarlett. She could not have been mistaken that day. And of course, Scarlett loved him. What had come between them? How could a husband and a wife cut each other to pieces with such sharp knives?
And apologies, once postponed, become harder and harder to make, and finally impossible.
