lo que el viento se llevo

A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
Title:
GONE WITH THE WIND
Author:
Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949)
eBook No.: 0200161.txt
Edition:
1
Language:
English
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Date first posted:
February 2002
Date most recently updated: February 2002
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Title:
Author:

GONE WITH THE WIND
Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949)

GONE WITH THE WIND
by
MargaretMitchell

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 greenwithout 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 ofTara, 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 herdecorous 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, crossednegligently. 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 mustardcolored 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 thatwere 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,...