But, for four years, he had seen others who had refused to recognize defeat, men who rode gaily into sure disaster because they were gallant. And they had been defeated, just the same. He thought as he stared at Will in the shadowy hall that he had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O’Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother’s velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster.
For all his exasperating qualities, she grew to look forward to his calls. There was something exciting about him that she could not analyze, something different from any man she had ever known. There was something breathtaking in the grace of his big body which made his very entrance into a room like an abrupt physical impact, something in the impertinence and bland mockery of his dark eyes that challenged her spirit to subdue him.
The O’Haras were a clannish tribe, clinging to one another in prosperity as well as in adversity, not for any overweening family affection but because they had learned through grim years that to survive a family must present an unbroken front to the world.
Don’t spoil it,” he said quietly.
Did you ever in your novel reading come across the old situation of the disinterested wife falling in love with her own husband?” “You know I don’t read novels,” she said and, trying to equal his jesting mood, went on: “Besides, you once said it was the height of bad form for husbands and wives to love each other.” “I once said too God damn many things,” he retorted abruptly and rose to his feet.
And now in this hour of greatest need, there was no one. It was incredible that she could be so completely alone, and frightened, and far from home.
God’s nightgown!” said Scarlett to herself in indignation, using Gerald’s favorite oath. “He looks as if – as if he knew what I looked like without my shimmy,” and, tossing her head, she went up the steps. In the.
He was excited by the war fever and pleased that Scarlett had made so good a match, and who was he to stand in the way of young love when there was a war? Ellen, distracted, finally gave in as other mothers throughout the South were doing. Their leisured world had been turned topsy-turvy, and their pleadings, prayers and advice availed nothing against the powerful forces sweeping them along.
You know she said I was going to marry a gentleman with jet-black hair and a long black mustache, and I don’t like black-haired gentlemen.
Una famiglia deve, per poter sopravvivere, presentare al mondo un fronte compatto.
But if true love carries any weight with you, you can be certain Miss Suellen will be rich in that if nothing else.
But Gerald has known poverty, and he could never learn to lose money with good humor or good grace.
As usual in the very young, she marveled that people could be so selfishly oblivious to her pain and the world rock along just the same, in spite of her heartbreak.
When Scarlett was seeing Rhett to the door, she asked indignantly: “If it were you, wouldn’t you enlist with the Yankees to keep from dying in that place and then desert?” “Of course,” said Rhett, his teeth showing beneath his mustache. “Then why didn’t Ashley do it?” “He’s a gentleman,” said Rhett, and Scarlett wondered how it was possible to convey such cynicism and contempt in that one honorable word.
But she felt that if Ashley succumbed to premeditated feminine tricks, she could never respect him as she now did. Any man who was fool enough to fall for a simper, a faint and an ‘oh, how wonderful you are!’ wasn’t worth having.
My news is this,” he answered, grinning down at her. “I still want you more than any woman I’ve ever seen and now that Frank’s gone, I thought you’d be interested to know it.
Do you really mean they like it? You wouldn’t fox an old friend, would you?′ – in response to Lois Cole’s telegram announcing that Macmillan liked the book that would become known as Gone With the Wind.
There will never again be men like them,” said Carreen softly. “No one can take their places.
I wouldn’t have grudged him your body. I know how little bodies mean – especially women’s bodies.
Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books.