seeming to be proud that they had lost it. The women bore themselves like ladies and she knew they were ladies, though menial tasks were their daily lot and they didn't know where their next dress was coming from. Ladies all! But she could not feel herself a lady, for all her velvet dress and scented hair, for all the pride of birth that stood behind her and the pride of wealth that had once been hers. Harsh contact with the red earth of Tara had stripped gentility from her and she knew she would never feel like a lady again until her table was weighted with silver and crystal and smoking with rich food, until her own horses and carriages stood in her stables, until black hands and not white took the cotton from Tara.
"Ah!" she thought angrily, sucking in her breath. That's the difference! Even though they're poor, they still feel like ladies and I don't. The silly fools don't seem to realize that you can't be a lady without money!"
Even in this flash of revelation, she realized vaguely that, foolish though they seemed,
theirs was the right attitude. Ellen would have thought so. This disturbed her. She knew she should feel as these people felt, but she could not. She knew she should believe devoutly, as they did, that a born lady remained a lady, even if reduced to poverty, but she could not make herself believe it now.
All her life she had heard sneers hurled at the Yankees because their pretensions to
gentility were based on wealth, not breeding. But at this moment, heresy though it was, she could not help thinking the Yankees were right on this one matter, even if wrong in all others. It took money to be a lady. She knew Ellen would have fainted had she ever heard such words from her daughter. No depth of poverty could ever have made Ellen feel ashamed. Ashamed! Yet, that was how Scarlett felt. Ashamed that she was poor and reduced to galling shifts and penury and work that negroes should do.
She shrugged in irritation. Perhaps these people were right and she was wrong but, just
the same, these proud fools weren't looking forward as she was doing, straining every nerve, risking even honor and good name to get back what they had lost. It was beneath the dignity of any of them to indulge in a scramble for money. The times were rude and hard. They called for rude and hard struggle if one was to conquer them. Scarlett knew that family tradition would forcibly restrain many of these people from such a struggle--with the making of money
admittedly its aim. They all thought that obvious money-making and even talk of money were vulgar in the extreme. Of course, there were exceptions. Mrs. Merriwether and her baking and René driving the pie wagon. And Hugh Elsing cutting and peddling firewood and Tommy
contracting. And Frank having the gumption to start a store. But what of the rank and file of them? The planters would scratch a few acres and live in poverty. The lawyers and doctors would go back to their professions and wait for clients who might never come. And the rest, those who had lived in leisure on their incomes? What would happen to them?
But she wasn't going to be poor all her life. She wasn't going to sit down and patiently
wait for a miracle to help her. She was going to rush into life and wrest from it what she could.
Her father had started as a poor immigrant boy and had won the broad acres of Tara. What he had done, his daughter could do. She wasn't like these people who had gambled everything on a Cause that was gone and were content to be proud of having lost that Cause, because it was worth any sacrifice. They drew their courage from the past. She was drawing hers from the future.
Frank Kennedy, at present, was her future. At least, he had the store and he had cash money. And if she could only marry him and get her hands on that money, she could make ends meet at Tara for another year. And after that--Frank must buy the sawmill. She could see for herself how quickly the town was rebuilding and anyone who could establish a lumber business now, when there was so little competition, would have a gold mine.
There came to her, from the recesses of her mind, words Rhett had spoken in the early years of the war about the money he made in the blockade. She had not taken the trouble to understand them then, but now they seemed perfectly clear and she wondered if it had been only her youth or plain stupidity which had kept her from appreciating them.
"There's just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one."
"This is the wreck he foresaw," she thought, "and he was right. There's still plenty of money to be made by anyone who isn't afraid to work--or to grab."
She saw Frank coming across the floor toward her with a glass of blackberry wine in his
hand and a morsel of cake on a saucer and she pulled her face into a smile. It did not occur to her to question whether Tara was worth marrying Frank. She knew it was worth it and she never gave the matter a second thought.