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Project Gutenberg Australia |
A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook |
Title: Gone With The Wind |
Author: Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) |
eBook No.: 0200161.txt |
Character set encoding: ASCII--7 bit |
Date first posted: February 2002 |
Date most recently updated: April 2022 |
This eBook was produced by: Don Lainson [email protected] |
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Title: Gone With The Wind |
Author: Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) |
PART ONE |
CHAPTER I |
Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when |
caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were |
too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast |
aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid |
Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, |
square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, |
starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. |
Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a |
startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin--that skin so |
prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, |
veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns. |
Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the |
porch of Tara, her father's plantation, that bright April |
afternoon of 1861, she made a pretty picture. Her new green |
flowered-muslin dress spread its twelve yards of billowing |
material over her hoops and exactly matched the flat-heeled green |
morocco slippers her father had recently brought her from Atlanta. |
The dress set off to perfection the seventeen-inch waist, the |
smallest in three counties, and the tightly fitting basque showed |
breasts well matured for her sixteen years. But for all the |
modesty of her spreading skirts, the demureness of hair netted |
smoothly into a chignon and the quietness of small white hands |
folded in her lap, her true self was poorly concealed. The green |
eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty |
with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor. |
Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother's gentle |
admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were |
her own. |
On either side of her, the twins lounged easily in their chairs, |
squinting at the sunlight through tall mint-garnished glasses as |
they laughed and talked, their long legs, booted to the knee and |
thick with saddle muscles, crossed negligently. Nineteen years |
old, six feet two inches tall, long of bone and hard of muscle, |
with sunburned faces and deep auburn hair, their eyes merry and |
arrogant, their bodies clothed in identical blue coats and |
mustard-colored breeches, they were as much alike as two bolls of |
cotton. |
Outside, the late afternoon sun slanted down in the yard, throwing |
into gleaming brightness the dogwood trees that were solid masses |
of white blossoms against the background of new green. The twins' |
horses were hitched in the driveway, big animals, red as their |
masters' hair; and around the horses' legs quarreled the pack of |
lean, nervous possum hounds that accompanied Stuart and Brent |
wherever they went. A little aloof, as became an aristocrat, lay |
a black-spotted carriage dog, muzzle on paws, patiently waiting |
for the boys to go home to supper. |
Between the hounds and the horses and the twins there was a |
kinship deeper than that of their constant companionship. They |
were all healthy, thoughtless young animals, sleek, graceful, |
high-spirited, the boys as mettlesome as the horses they rode, |
mettlesome and dangerous but, withal, sweet-tempered to those who |
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