Chapter - 29 | Gone with the Wind

-nine
THE FOLLOWING APRIL GENERAL JOHNSTON, who had been given back the
shattered remnants of his old command, surrendered them in North
Carolina and the war was over. But not until two weeks later did the news
reach Tara. There was too much to do at Tara for anyone to waste time
traveling abroad and hearing gossip and, as the neighbors were just as busy
as they, there was little visiting and news spread slowly.
Spring plowing was at its height and the cotton and garden seed Pork
had brought from Macon were being put into the ground. Pork had been
almost worthless since the trip, so proud was he of returning safely with his
wagonload of dress goods, seed, fowls, hams, side meat and meal. Over and
over, he told the story of his many narrow escapes, of the bypaths and
country lanes he had taken on his return to Tara, the unfrequented roads,
the old trails, the bridle paths. He had been ﬁve weeks on the road,
agonizing weeks for Scarlett. But she did not upbraid him on his return, for
she was happy that he had made the trip successfully and pleased that he
brought back so much of the money she had given him. She had a shrewd
suspicion that the reason he had so much money left over was that he had
not bought the fowls or most of the food. Pork would have taken shame to
himself had he spent her money when there were unguarded hen coops
along the road and smokehouses handy.
Now that they had a little food, everyone at Tara was busy trying to
restore some semblance of naturalness to life. There was work for every pair
of hands, too much work, never-ending work. The withered stalks of last
year’s cotton had to be removed to make way for this year’s seeds and the
balky horse, unaccustomed to the plow, dragged unwillingly through the
ﬁelds. Weeds had to be pulled from the garden and the seeds planted,
ﬁrewood had to be cut, a beginning had to be made toward replacing the
pens and the miles and miles of fences so casually burned by the Yankees.

The snares Pork set for rabbits had to be visited twice a day and the
ﬁshlines in the river rebaited. There were beds to be made and ﬂoors to be
swept, food to be cooked and dishes washed, hogs and chickens to be fed
and eggs gathered. The cow had to be milked and pastured near the swamp
and someone had to watch her all day for fear the Yankees or Frank
Kennedy’s men would return and take her. Even little Wade had his duties.
Every morning he went out importantly with a basket to pick up twigs and
chips to start the ﬁres with.
It was the Fontaine boys, the ﬁrst of the County men home from the
war, who brought the news of the surrender. Alex, who still had boots, was
walking and Tony, barefooted, was riding on the bare back of a mule. Tony
always managed to get the best of things in that family. They were
swarthier than ever from four years’ exposure to sun and storm, thinner,
more wiry, and the wild black beards they brought back from the war made
them seem like strangers.
On their way to Mimosa and eager for home, they only stopped a
moment at Tara to kiss the girls and give them news of the surrender. It was
all over, they said, all ﬁnished, and they did not seem to care much or want
to talk about it. All they wanted to know was whether Mimosa had been
burned. On the way south from Atlanta, they had passed chimney after
chimney where the homes of friends had stood and it seemed almost too
much to hope that their own house had been spared. They sighed with
relief at the welcome news and laughed, slapping their thighs when
Scarlett told them of Sally’s wild ride and how neatly she had cleared their
hedge.
“She’s a spunky girl,” said Tony, “and it’s rotten luck for her, Joe getting
killed. You all got any chewing tobacco, Scarlett?”
“Nothing but rabbit tobacco. Pa smokes it in a corn cob.”
“I haven’t fallen that low yet,” said Tony, “but I’ll probably come to it.”
“Is Dimity Munroe all right?” asked Alex, eagerly but a little
embarrassed, and Scarlett recalled vaguely that he had been sweet on
Sally’s younger sister.
“Oh, yes. She’s living with her aunt over in Fayetteville now. You know
their house in Lovejoy was burned. And the rest of her folks are in Macon.”
“What he means is—has Dimity married some brave colonel in the
Home Guard?” jeered Tony, and Alex turned furious eyes upon him.

“Of course, she isn’t married,” said Scarlett, amused.
“Maybe it would be better if she had,” said Alex gloomily. “How the hell
—I beg your pardon, Scarlett. But how can a man ask a girl to marry him
when his darkies are all freed and his stock gone and he hasn’t got a cent in
his pockets?”
“You know that wouldn’t bother Dimity,” said Scarlett. She could afford
to be loyal to Dimity and say nice things about her, for Alex Fontaine had
never been one of her own beaux.
“Hell’s aﬁre—Well, I beg your pardon again. I’ll have to quit swearing or
Grandma will sure tan my hide. I’m not asking any girl to marry a pauper. It
mightn’t bother her but it would bother me.”
While Scarlett talked to the boys on the front porch, Melanie, Suellen
and Carreen slipped silently into the house as soon as they heard the news
of the surrender. After the boys had gone, cutting across the back ﬁelds of
Tara toward home, Scarlett went inside and heard the girls sobbing
together on the sofa in Ellen’s little ofﬁce. It was all over, the bright
beautiful dream they had loved and hoped for, the Cause which had taken
their friends, lovers, husbands and beggared their families. The Cause they
had thought could never fall had fallen forever.
But for Scarlett, there were no tears. In the ﬁrst moment when she
heard the news she thought: Thank God! Now the cow won’t be stolen.
Now the horse is safe. Now we can take the silver out of the well and
everybody can have a knife and fork. Now I won’t be afraid to drive round
the country looking for something to eat.
What a relief! Never again would she start in fear at the sound of
hooves. Never again would she wake in the dark nights, holding her breath
to listen, wondering if it were reality or only a dream that she heard in the
yard the rattle of bits, the stamping of hooves and the harsh crying of
orders by the Yankees. And, best of all, Tara was safe! Now her worst
nightmare would never come true. Now she would never have to stand on
the lawn and see smoke billowing from the beloved house and hear the roar
of ﬂames as the roof fell in.
Yes, the Cause was dead but war had always seemed foolish to her and
peace was better. She had never stood starry eyed when the Stars and Bars
ran up a pole or felt cold chills when “Dixie” sounded. She had not been
sustained through privations, the sickening duties of nursing, the fears of

the siege and the hunger of the last few months by the fanatic glow which
made all these things endurable to others, if only the Cause prospered. It
was all over and done with and she was not going to cry about it.
All over! The war which had seemed so endless, the war which,
unbidden and unwanted, had cut her life in two, had made so clean a
cleavage that it was difﬁcult to remember those other care-free days. She
could look back, unmoved, at the pretty Scarlett with her fragile green
morocco slippers and her ﬂounces fragrant with lavender but she wondered
if she could be that same girl. Scarlett O’Hara, with the County at her feet,
a hundred slaves to do her bidding, the wealth of Tara like a wall behind
her and doting parents anxious to grant any desire of her heart. Spoiled,
careless Scarlett who had never known an ungratiﬁed wish except where
Ashley was concerned.
Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the
girl with her sachet and dancing slippers had slipped away and there was
left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies and turned her
hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the
wreckage except the indestructible red earth on which she stood.
As she stood in the hall, listening to the girls sobbing, her mind was
busy.
“We’ll plant more cotton, lots more. I’ll send Pork to Macon tomorrow
to buy more seed. Now the Yankees won’t burn it and our troops won’t
need it. Good Lord! Cotton ought to go sky high this fall!”
She went into the little ofﬁce and, disregarding the weeping girls on the
sofa, seated herself at the secretary and picked up a quill to balance the cost
of more cotton seed against her remaining cash.
“The war is over,” she thought and suddenly she dropped the quill as a
wild happiness ﬂooded her. The war was over and Ashley—if Ashley was
alive he’d be coming home! She wondered if Melanie, in the midst of
mourning for the lost Cause, had thought of this.
“Soon we’ll get a letter—no, not a letter. We can’t get letters. But soon
—oh, somehow he’ll let us know!”
But the days passed into weeks and there was no news from Ashley. The
mail service in the South was uncertain and in the rural districts there was
none at all. Occasionally a passing traveler from Atlanta brought a note

from Aunt Pitty tearfully begging the girls to come back. But never news of
Ashley.
* * *
After the surrender, an ever-present feud over the horse smoldered between
Scarlett and Suellen. Now that there was no danger of Yankees, Suellen
wanted to go calling on the neighbors. Lonely and missing the happy
sociability of the old days, Suellen longed to visit friends, if for no other
reason than to assure herself that the rest of the County was as bad off as
Tara. But Scarlett was adamant. The horse was for work, to drag logs from
the woods, to plow and for Pork to ride in search of food. On Sundays he
had earned the right to graze in the pasture and rest. If Suellen wanted to
go visiting she could go afoot.
Before the last year Suellen had never walked a hundred yards in her life
and this prospect was anything but pleasing. So she stayed at home and
nagged and cried and said, once too often: “Oh, if only Mother was here!”
At that, Scarlett gave her the long-promised slap, hitting her so hard it
knocked her screaming to the bed and caused great consternation
throughout the house. Thereafter, Suellen whined the less, at least in
Scarlett’s presence.
Scarlett spoke truthfully when she said she wanted the horse to rest but
that was only half of the truth. The other half was that she had paid one
round of calls on the County in the ﬁrst month after the surrender and the
sight of old friends and old plantations had shaken her courage more than
she liked to admit.
The Fontaines had fared best of any, thanks to Sally’s hard ride, but it
was ﬂourishing only by comparison with the desperate situation of the
other neighbors. Grandma Fontaine had never completely recovered from
the heart attack she had the day she led the others in beating out the
ﬂames and saving the house. Old Dr. Fontaine was convalescing slowly
from an amputated arm. Alex and Tony were turning awkward hands to
plows and hoe handles. They leaned over the fence rail to shake hands
with Scarlett when she called and they laughed at her rickety wagon, their
black eyes bitter, for they were laughing at themselves as well as her. She

asked to buy seed corn from them and they promised it and fell to
discussing farm problems. They had twelve chickens, two cows, ﬁve hogs
and the mule they brought home from the war. One of the hogs had just
died and they were worried about losing the others. At hearing such serious
words about hogs from these ex-dandies who had never given life a more
serious thought than which cravat was most fashionable, Scarlett laughed
and this time her laugh was bitter too.
They had all made her welcome at Mimosa and had insisted on giving,
not selling, her the seed corn. The quick Fontaine tempers ﬂared when she
put a greenback on the table and they ﬂatly refused payment. Scarlett took
the corn and privately slipped a dollar bill into Sally’s hand. Sally looked
like a different person from the girl who had greeted her eight months
before when Scarlett ﬁrst came home to Tara. Then she had been pale and
sad but there had been a buoyancy about her. Now that buoyancy had
gone, as if the surrender had taken all hope from her.
“Scarlett,” she whispered as she clutched the bill, “what was the good of
it all? Why did we ever ﬁght? Oh, my poor Joe! Oh, my poor baby!”
“I don’t know why we fought and I don’t care,” said Scarlett. “And I’m
not interested. I never was interested. War is a man’s business, not a
woman’s. All I’m interested in now is a good cotton crop. Now take this
dollar and buy little Joe a dress. God knows, he needs it. I’m not going to
rob you of your corn, for all Alex and Tony’s politeness.”
The boys followed her to the wagon and assisted her in, courtly for all
their rags, gay with the volatile Fontaine gaiety, but with the picture of
their destitution in her eyes, she shivered as she drove away from Mimosa.
She was so tired of poverty and pinching. What a pleasure it would be to
know people who were rich and not worried as to where the next meal was
coming from!
Cade Calvert was at home at Pine Bloom and, as Scarlett came up the
steps of the old house in which she had danced so often in happier days,
she saw that death was in his face. He was emaciated and he coughed as he
lay in an easy chair in the sunshine with a shawl across his knees, but his
face lit up when he saw her. Just a little cold which had settled in his chest,
he said, trying to rise to greet her. Got it from sleeping so much in the rain.
But it would be gone soon and then he’d lend a hand in the work.

Cathleen Calvert, who came out of the house at the sound of voices,
met Scarlett’s eyes above her brother’s head and in them Scarlett read
knowledge and bitter despair. Cade might not know but Cathleen knew.
Pine Bloom looked straggly and overgrown with weeds, seedling pines were
beginning to show in the ﬁelds and the house was sagging and untidy.
Cathleen was thin and taut.
The two of them, with their Yankee stepmother, their four little half-
sisters, and Hilton, the Yankee overseer, remained in the silent, oddly
echoing house. Scarlett had never liked Hilton any more than she liked
their own overseer Jonas Wilkerson, and she liked him even less now, as he
sauntered forward and greeted her like an equal. Formerly he had the same
combination of servility and impertinence which Wilkerson possessed but
now, with Mr. Calvert and Raiford dead in the war and Cade sick, he had
dropped all servility. The second Mrs. Calvert had never known how to
compel respect from negro servants and it was not to be expected that she
could get it from a white man.
“Mr. Hilton has been so kind about staying with us through these
difﬁcult times,” said Mrs. Calvert nervously, casting quick glances at her
silent stepdaughter. “Very kind. I suppose you heard how he saved our
house twice when Sherman was here. I’m sure I don’t know how we would
have managed without him, with no money and Cade—”
A ﬂush went over Cade’s white face and Cathleen’s long lashes veiled
her eyes as her mouth hardened. Scarlett knew their souls were writhing in
helpless rage at being under obligations to their Yankee overseer. Mrs.
Calvert seemed ready to weep. She had somehow made a blunder. She was
always blundering. She just couldn’t understand Southerners, for all that
she had lived in Georgia twenty years. She never knew what not to say to
her stepchildren and, no matter what she said or did, they were always so
exquisitely polite to her. Silently she vowed she would go North to her own
people, taking her children with her, and leave these puzzling stiff-necked
strangers.
After these visits, Scarlett had no desire to see the Tarletons. Now that
the four boys were gone, the house burned and the family cramped in the
overseer’s cottage, she could not bring herself to go. But Suellen and
Carreen begged and Melanie said it would be unneighborly not to call and
welcome Mr. Tarleton back from the war, so one Sunday they went.

This was the worst of all.
As they drove up by the ruins of the house, they saw Beatrice Tarleton
dressed in a worn riding habit, a crop under her arm, sitting on the top rail
of the fence about the paddock, staring moodily at nothing. Beside her
perched the bow-legged little negro who had trained her horses and he
looked as glum as his mistress. The paddock, once full of frolicking colts
and placid brood mares, was empty now except for one mule, the mule Mr.
Tarleton had ridden home from the surrender.
“I swear I don’t know what to do with myself now that my darlings are
gone,” said Mrs. Tarleton, climbing down from the fence. A stranger might
have thought she spoke of her four dead sons, but the girls from Tara knew
her horses were in her mind. “All my beautiful horses dead. And oh, my
poor Nellie! If I just had Nellie! And nothing but a damned mule on the
place. A damned mule,” she repeated, looking indignantly at the scrawny
beast. “It’s an insult to the memory of my blooded darlings to have a mule
in their paddock. Mules are misbegotten, unnatural critters and it ought to
be illegal to breed them.”
Jim Tarleton, completely disguised by a bushy beard, came out of the
overseer’s house to welcome and kiss the girls and his four red-haired
daughters in mended dresses streamed out behind him, tripping over the
dozen black and tan hounds which ran barking to the door at the sound of
strange voices. There was an air of studied and determined cheerfulness
about the whole family which brought a colder chill to Scarlett’s bones
than the bitterness of Mimosa or the deathly brooding of Pine Bloom.
The Tarletons insisted that the girls stay for dinner, saying they had so
few guests these days and wanted to hear all the news. Scarlett did not
want to linger, for the atmosphere oppressed her, but Melanie and her two
sisters were anxious for a longer visit, so the four stayed for dinner and ate
sparingly of the side meat and dried peas which were served them.
There was laughter about the skimpy fare and the Tarleton girls giggled
as they told of makeshifts for clothes, as if they were telling the most
amusing of jokes. Melanie met them halfway, surprising Scarlett with her
unexpected vivacity as she told of trials at Tara, making light of hardships.
Scarlett could hardly speak at all. The room seemed so empty without the
four great Tarleton boys, lounging and smoking and teasing. And if it

seemed empty to her, what must it seem to the Tarletons who were offering
a smiling front to their neighbors?
Carreen had said little during the meal but when it was over she slipped
over to Mrs. Tarleton’s side and whispered something. Mrs. Tarleton’s face
changed and the brittle smile left her lips as she put her arm around
Carreen’s slender waist. They left the room, and Scarlett, who felt she
could not endure the house another minute, followed them. They went
down the path through the garden and Scarlett saw they were going toward
the burying ground. Well, she couldn’t go back to the house now. It would
seem too rude. But what on earth did Carreen mean dragging Mrs. Tarleton
out to the boys’ graves when Beatrice was trying so hard to be brave?
There were two new marble markers in the brick-inclosed lot under the
funereal cedars—so new that no rain had splashed them with red dust.
“We got them last week,” said Mrs. Tarleton proudly. “Mr. Tarleton went
to Macon and brought them home in the wagon.”
Tombstones! And what they must have cost! Suddenly Scarlett did not
feel as sorry for the Tarletons as she had at ﬁrst. Anybody who would waste
precious money on tombstones when food was so dear, so almost
unattainable, didn’t deserve sympathy. And there were several lines carved
on each of the stones. The more carving, the more money. The whole
family must be crazy! And it had cost money, too, to bring the three boys’
bodies home. They had never found Boyd or any trace of him.
Between the graves of Brent and Stuart was a stone which read: “They
were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not
divided.”
On the other stone were the names of Boyd and Tom with something in
Latin which began “Dulce et—” but it meant nothing to Scarlett who had
managed to evade Latin at the Fayetteville Academy.
All that money for tombstones! Why, they were fools! She felt as
indignant as if her own money had been squandered.
Carreen’s eyes were shining oddly.
“I think it’s lovely,” she whispered pointing to the ﬁrst stone.
Carreen would think it lovely. Anything sentimental stirred her.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Tarleton and her voice was soft, “we thought it very
ﬁtting—they died almost at the same time, Stuart ﬁrst and then Brent who
caught up the ﬂag he dropped.”

As the girls drove back to Tara, Scarlett was silent for a while, thinking
of what she had seen in the various homes, remembering against her will
the County in its glory, with visitors at all the big houses and money
plentiful, negroes crowding the quarters and the well-tended ﬁelds glorious
with cotton.
“In another year, there’ll be little pines all over these ﬁelds,” she thought
and looking toward the encircling forest she shuddered. “Without the
darkies, it will be all we can do to keep body and soul together. Nobody can
run a big plantation without the darkies, and lots of the ﬁelds won’t be
cultivated at all and the woods will take over the ﬁelds again. Nobody can
plant much cotton, and what will we do then? What’ll become of country
folks? Town folks can manage somehow. They’ve always managed. But we
country folks will go back a hundred years like the pioneers who had little
cabins and just scratched a few acres—and barely existed.
“No—” she thought grimly, “Tara isn’t going to be like that. Not even if
I have to plow myself. This whole section, this whole state can go back to
woods if it wants to, but I won’t let Tara go. And I don’t intend to waste my
money on tombstones or my time crying about the war. We can make out
somehow. I know we could make out somehow if the men weren’t all dead.
Losing the darkies isn’t the worst part about this. It’s the loss of the men,
the young men.” She thought again of the four Tarletons and Joe Fontaine,
of Raiford Calvert and the Munroe brothers and all the boys from
Fayetteville and Jonesboro whose names she had read on the casualty lists.
“If there were just enough men left, we could manage somehow but—”
Another thought struck her—suppose she wanted to marry again. Of
course, she didn’t want to marry again. Once was certainly enough. Besides,
the only man she’d ever wanted was Ashley and he was married if he was
still living. But suppose she should want to marry. Who would there be to
marry her? The thought was appalling.
“Melly,” she said, “what’s going to happen to Southern girls?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I say. What’s going to happen to them? There’s no one to
marry them. Why, Melly, with all the boys dead, there’ll be thousands of
girls all over the South who’ll die old maids.”
“And never have any children,” added Melanie, to whom this was the
most important thing.

Evidently the thought was not new to Suellen who sat in the back of the
wagon, for she suddenly began to cry. She had not heard from Frank
Kennedy since Christmas. She did not know if the lack of mail service was
the cause, or if he had merely triﬂed with her affections and then forgotten
her. Or maybe he had been killed in the last days of the war! The latter
would have been inﬁnitely preferable to his forgetting her, for at least there
was some dignity about a dead love, such as Carreen and India Wilkes had,
but none about a deserted ﬁancée.
“Oh, in the name of God, hush!” said Scarlett.
“Oh, you can talk,” sobbed Suellen, “because you’ve been married and
had a baby and everybody knows some man wanted you. But look at me!
And you’ve got to be mean and throw it up to me that I’m an old maid
when I can’t help myself. I think you’re hateful.”
“Oh, hush! You know how I hate people who bawl all the time. You
know perfectly well old Ginger Whiskers isn’t dead and that he’ll come
back and marry you. He hasn’t any better sense. But personally, I’d rather
be an old maid than marry him.”
There was silence from the back of the wagon for a while and Carreen
comforted her sister with absent-minded pats, for her mind was a long way
off, riding paths three years old with Brent Tarleton beside her. There was a
glow, an exaltation in her eyes.
“Ah,” said Melanie sadly, “what will the South be like without all our
ﬁne boys? What would the South have been if they had lived? We could
use their courage and their energy and their brains. Scarlett, all of us with
little boys must raise them to take the places of the men who are gone, to
be brave men like them.”
“There will never again be men like them,” said Carreen softly. “No one
can take their places.”
They drove home the rest of the way in silence.
* * *
One day not long after this, Cathleen Calvert rode up to Tara at sunset.
Her sidesaddle was strapped on as sorry a mule as Scarlett had ever seen, a
ﬂop-eared lame brute, and Cathleen was almost as sorry looking as the

animal she rode. Her dress was of faded gingham of the type once worn
only by house servants, and her sunbonnet was secured under her chin by a
piece of twine. She rode up to the front porch but did not dismount, and
Scarlett and Melanie, who had been watching the sunset, went down the
steps to meet her. Cathleen was as white as Cade had been the day Scarlett
called, white and hard and brittle, as if her face would shatter if she spoke.
But her back was erect and her head was high as she nodded to them.
Scarlett suddenly remembered the day of the Wilkes barbecue when she
and Cathleen had whispered together about Rhett Butler. How pretty and
fresh Cathleen had been that day in a swirl of blue organdie with fragrant
roses at her sash and little black velvet slippers laced about her small
ankles. And now there was not a trace of that girl in the stiff ﬁgure sitting
on the mule.
“I won’t get down, thank you,” she said. “I just came to tell you that I’m
going to be married.”
“What!”
“Who to?”
“Cathy, how grand!”
“When?”
“Tomorrow,” said Cathleen quietly and there was something in her
voice which took the eager smiles from their faces. “I came to tell you that
I’m going to be married tomorrow, in Jonesboro—and I’m not inviting you
all to come.”
They digested this in silence, looking up at her, puzzled. Then Melanie
spoke.
“Is it someone we know, dear?”
“Yes,” said Cathleen, shortly. “It’s Mr. Hilton.”
“Mr. Hilton?”
“Yes, Mr. Hilton, our overseer.”
Scarlett could not even ﬁnd voice to say “Oh!” but Cathleen, peering
down suddenly at Melanie, said in a low savage voice: “If you cry, Melly, I
can’t stand it. I shall die!”
Melanie said nothing but patted the foot in its awkward home-made
shoe which hung from the stirrup. Her head was low.
“And don’t pat me! I can’t stand that either.”
Melanie dropped her hand but still did not look up.

“Well, I must go. I only came to tell you.” The white brittle mask was
back again and she picked up the reins.
“How is Cade?” asked Scarlett, utterly at a loss but fumbling for some
words to break the awkward silence.
“He is dying,” said Cathleen shortly. There seemed to be no feeling in
her voice. “And he is going to die in some comfort and peace if I can
manage it, without worry about who will take care of me when he’s gone.
You see, my stepmother and the children are going North for good,
tomorrow. Well, I must be going.”
Melanie looked up and met Cathleen’s hard eyes. There were bright
tears on Melanie’s lashes and understanding in her eyes, and before them,
Cathleen’s lips curved into the crooked smile of a brave child who tries not
to cry. It was all very bewildering to Scarlett who was still trying to grasp
the idea that Cathleen Calvert was going to marry an overseer—Cathleen,
daughter of a rich planter, Cathleen who, next to Scarlett, had had more
beaux than any girl in the County.
Cathleen bent down and Melanie tiptoed. They kissed. Then Cathleen
ﬂapped the bridle reins sharply and the old mule moved off.
Melanie looked after her, the tears streaming down her face. Scarlett
stared, still dazed.
“Melly, is she crazy? You know she can’t be in love with him.”
“In love? Oh, Scarlett, don’t even suggest such a horrid thing! Oh, poor
Cathleen! Poor Cade!”
“Fiddle-dee-dee!” cried Scarlett, beginning to be irritated. It was
annoying that Melanie always seemed to grasp more of situations than she
herself did. Cathleen’s plight seemed to her more startling than
catastrophic. Of course it was no pleasant thought, marrying Yankee white
trash, but after all a girl couldn’t live alone on a plantation; she had to
have a husband to help her run it.
“Melly, it’s like I said the other day. There isn’t anybody for girls to
marry and they’ve got to marry someone.”
“Oh, they don’t have to marry! There’s nothing shameful in being a
spinster. Look at Aunt Pitty. Oh, I’d rather see Cathleen dead! I know
Cade would rather see her dead. It’s the end of the Calverts. Just think
what her—what their children will be. Oh, Scarlett, have Pork saddle the
horse quickly and you ride after her and tell her to come live with us!”

“Good Lord!” cried Scarlett, shocked at the matter-of-fact way in which
Melanie was offering Tara. Scarlett certainly had no intention of feeding
another mouth. She started to say this but something in Melanie’s stricken
face halted the words.
“She wouldn’t come, Melly,” she amended. “You know she wouldn’t.
She’s so proud and she’d think it was charity.”
“That’s true, that’s true!” said Melanie distractedly, watching the small
cloud of red dust disappear down the road.
“You’ve been with me for months,” thought Scarlett grimly, looking at
her sister-in-law, “and it’s never occurred to you that it’s charity you’re
living on. And I guess it never will. You’re one of those people the war
didn’t change and you go right on thinking and acting just like nothing
had happened—like we were still rich as Croesus and had more food than
we knew what to do with and guests didn’t matter. I guess I’ve got you on
my neck for the rest of my life. But I won’t have Cathleen too.”