Is to give him another baby just as quickly as you can."

"Hah!" thought Scarlett bitterly, as she left his office. That was

easier said than done. She would gladly have another child,

several children, if they would take that look out of Rhett's eyes

and fill up the aching spaces in her own heart. A boy who had

Rhett's dark handsomeness and another little girl. Oh, for another

girl, pretty and gay and willful and full of laughter, not like the

giddy-brained Ella. Why, oh, why couldn't God have taken Ella if

He had to take one of her children? Ella was no comfort to her,

now that Bonnie was gone. But Rhett did not seem to want any other

children. At least he never came to her bedroom though now the

door was never locked and usually invitingly ajar. He did not seem

to care. He did not seem to care for anything now except whisky

and that blowzy red-haired woman.

He was bitter now, where he had been pleasantly jeering, brutal

where his thrusts had once been tempered with humor. After Bonnie

died, many of the good ladies of the neighborhood who had been won

over to him by his charming manners with his daughter were anxious

to show him kindness. They stopped him on the street to give him

their sympathy and spoke to him from over their hedges, saying that

they understood. But now that Bonnie, the reason for his good

manners, was gone the manners went to. He cut the ladies and their

well-meant condolences off shortly, rudely.

But, oddly enough, the ladies were not offended. They understood,

or thought they understood. When he rode home in the twilight

almost too drunk to stay in the saddle, scowling at those who spoke

to him, the ladies said "Poor thing!" and redoubled their efforts

to be kind and gentle. They felt very sorry for him, broken

hearted and riding home to no better comfort than Scarlett.

Everybody knew how cold and heartless she was. Everybody was

appalled at the seeming ease with which she had recovered from

Bonnie's death, never realizing or caring to realize the effort

that lay behind that seeming recovery. Rhett had the town's

tenderest sympathy and he neither knew nor cared. Scarlett had the

town's dislike and, for once, she would have welcomed the sympathy

of old friends.

Now, none of her old friends came to the house, except Aunt Pitty,

Melanie and Ashley. Only the new friends came calling in their

shining carriages, anxious to tell her of their sympathy, eager to

divert her with gossip about other new friends in whom she was not

at all interested. All these "new people," strangers, every one!

They didn't know her. They would never know her. They had no

realization of what her life had been before she reached her

present safe eminence in her mansion on Peachtree Street. They

didn't care to talk about what their lives had been before they

attained stiff brocades and victorias with fine teams of horses.

They didn't know of her struggles, her privations, all the things

that made this great house and pretty clothes and silver and

receptions worth having. They didn't know. They didn't care,

these people from God-knows-where who seemed to live always on the

surface of things, who had no common memories of war and hunger and

fighting, who had no common roots going down into the same red

earth.

Now in her loneliness, she would have liked to while away the

afternoons with Maybelle or Fanny or Mrs. Elsing or Mrs. Whiting or

even that redoubtable old warrior, Mrs. Merriwether. Or Mrs.

Bonnell or--or any of her old friends and neighbors. For they

knew. They had known war and terror and fire, had seen dear ones

dead before their time; they had hungered and been ragged, had

lived with the wolf at the door. And they had rebuilt fortune from

ruin.