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Part One

CHAPTER I

SCARLETT O'HARA was not beautiful, but ht by her charm as the Tarleton tere 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 the oblique line in her nolia-white skin--that skin so prized by Southern wouarded with bonnets, veils and ia 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 reen flowered- reen ht her from Atlanta The dress set off to perfection the seventeen-inch waist, the s basque showed breasts well matured for her sixteen years But for all theskirts, the denon 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 entle 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 talllegs, booted to the knee and thick with saddle ently Nineteen years old, six feet two inches tall, long of bone and hard of muscle, with sunburned faces and deep auburn hair, their eyes ant, 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 gleawood trees that were solid reen The twins' horses were hitched in the driveway, big anis quarreled the pack of lean, nervous possum hounds that accompanied Stuart and Brent wherever they went A little aloof, as beca, o home to supper

Between the hounds and the horses and the twins there was a kinship deeper than that of their constant co anih-spirited, the boys as erous but, withal, sweet-tempered to those who kne to handle them

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 Life in the north Georgia county of Clayton was still new and, according to the standards of Augusta, Savannah and Charleston, a little crude The more sedate and older sections of the South looked down their noses at the up-country Georgians, but here in north Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education carried no shas thatstraight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentles that mattered

In these accomplish in their notorious inability to learn anything contained between the covers of books Their family had more money, more horses, more slaves than any one else in the County, but the boys had less grahbors

It was for this precise reason that Stuart and Brent were idling on the porch of Tara this April afternoon They had just been expelled froia, the fourth university that had thrown them out in two years; and their older brothers, Tom and Boyd, had come home with them, because they refused to remain at an institution where the tere not welcome Stuart and Brent considered their latest expulsion a fine joke, and Scarlett, who had not willingly opened a book since leaving the Fayetteville Fe as they did

"I know you two don't care about being expelled, or Tom either," she said "But what about Boyd? He's kind of set on getting an education, and you two have pulled hiinia and Alabaet finished at this rate"

"Oh, he can read law in Judge Parmalee's office over in Fayetteville," answered Brent carelessly "Besides, it don't matter much We'd have had to come home before the term was out anyway"

"Why?"

"The war, goose! The war's going to start any day, and you don't suppose any of us would stay in college with a war going on, do you?"

"You know there isn't going to be any war," said Scarlett, bored "It's all just talk Why, Ashley Wilkes and his father told Pa just last week that our coton would coreement with Mr Lincoln about the Confederacy And anyway, the Yankees are too scared of us to fight There won't be any war, and I' about it"

"Not going to be any war!" cried the twins indignantly, as though they had been defrauded

"Why, honey, of course there's going to be a

war," said Stuart The Yankees ard shelled theht or stand branded as cowards before the whole world Why, the Confederacy --"

Scarlett made a mouth of bored impatience

If you say 'war' just once otten so tired of any one word in my life as 'war,' unless it's 'secession' Pa talks war entlemen who cohts and Abe Lincoln till I get so bored I could scream! And that's all the boys talk about, too, that and their old Troop There hasn't been any fun at any party this spring because the boys can't talk about anything else I'ia waited till after Christmas before it seceded or it would have ruined the Christo in the house"

Sheendure any conversation of which she was not the chief subject But she s her di her bristly black lashes as swiftly as butterflies' wings The boys were enchanted, as she had intended the her They thought none the less of her for her lack of interest Indeed, they thought more War was men's business, not ladies', and they took her attitude as evidence of her femininity

Havingsubject of war, she went back with interest to their immediate situation

"What did your ain?"