Victory never wavered. But the war was dragging out so long.

There were so many dead, so many wounded and maimed for life, so

many widowed, so many orphaned. And there was still a long

struggle ahead, which meant more dead, more wounded, more widows

and orphans.

To make matters worse, a vague distrust of those in high places had

begun to creep over the civilian population. Many newspapers were

outspoken in their denunciation of President Davis himself and the

manner in which he prosecuted the war. There were dissensions

within the Confederate cabinet, disagreements between President

Davis and his generals. The currency was falling rapidly. Shoes

and clothing for the army were scarce, ordnance supplies and drugs

were scarcer. The railroads needed new cars to take the place of

old ones and new iron rails to replace those torn up by the

Yankees. The generals in the field were crying out for fresh

troops, and there were fewer and fewer fresh troops to be had.

Worst of all, some of the state governors, Governor Brown of

Georgia among them, were refusing to send state militia troops and

arms out of their borders. There were thousands of able-bodied men

In the state troops for whom the army was frantic, but the

government pleaded for them in vain.

With the new fall of currency, prices soared again. Beef, pork and

butter cost thirty-five dollars a pound, flour fourteen hundred

dollars a barrel, soda one hundred dollars a pound, tea five

hundred dollars a pound. Warm clothing, when it was obtainable at

all, had risen to such prohibitive prices that Atlanta ladies were

lining their old dresses with rags and reinforcing them with

newspapers to keep out the wind. Shoes cost from two hundred to

eight hundred dollars a pair, depending on whether they were made

of "cardboard" or real leather. Ladies now wore gaiters made of

their old wool shawls and cut-up carpets. The soles were made of

wood.

The truth was that the North was holding the South in a virtual

state of siege, though many did not realize it. The Yankee

gunboats had tightened the mesh at the ports and very few ships

were now able to slip past the blockade.

The South had always lived by selling cotton and buying the things

It did not produce, but now it could neither sell nor buy. Gerald

O'Hara had three years' crops of cotton stored under the shed near

the gin house at Tara, but little good it did him. In Liverpool it

would bring one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but there was

no hope of getting it to Liverpool. Gerald had changed from a

wealthy man to a man who was wondering how he would feed his family

and his negroes through the winter.

Throughout the South, most of the cotton planters were in the same

fix. With the blockade closing tighter and tighter, there was no

way to get the South's money crop to its market in England, no way

to bring in the necessaries which cotton money had brought in years

gone by. And the agricultural South, waging war with the

industrial North, was needing so many things now, things it had

never thought of buying in times of peace.

It was a situation made to order for speculators and profiteers,

and men were not lacking to take advantage of it. As food and

clothing grew scarcer and prices rose higher and higher, the public

outcry against the speculators grew louder and more venomous. In

those early days of 1864, no newspaper could be opened that did not

carry scathing editorials denouncing the speculators as vultures

and bloodsucking leeches and calling upon the government to put

them down with a hard hand. The government did its best, but the

efforts came to nothing, for the government was harried by many

things.

Against no one was feeling more bitter than against Rhett Butler.

He had sold his boats when blockading grew too hazardous, and he

was now openly engaged in food speculation. The stories about him

that came back to Atlanta from Richmond and Wilmington made those

who had received him in other days writhe with shame.

In spite of all these trials and tribulations, Atlanta's ten

thousand population had grown to double that number during the war.

Even the blockade had added to Atlanta's prestige. From time

immemorial, the coast cities had dominated the South, commercially

and otherwise. But now with the ports closed and many of the port

cities captured or besieged, the South's salvation depended upon

itself. The interior section was what counted, if the South was

going to win the war, and Atlanta was now the center of things.

The people of the town were suffering hardship, privation, sickness

and death as severely as the rest of the Confederacy; but Atlanta,

the city, had gained rather than lost as a result of the war.

Atlanta, the heart of the Confederacy, was still beating full and

strong, the railroads that were its arteries throbbing with the

never-ending flow of men, munitions and supplies.

In other days, Scarlett would have been bitter about her shabby

dresses and patched shoes but now she did not care, for the one

person who mattered was not there to see her. She was happy those

two months, happier than she had been in years. Had she not felt

the start of Ashley's heart when her arms went round his neck? seen

that despairing look on his face which was more open an avowal than

any words could be? He loved her. She was sure of that now, and

this conviction was so pleasant she could even be kinder to

Melanie. She could be sorry for Melanie now, sorry with a faint

contempt for her blindness, her stupidity.

"When the war is over!" she thought. "When it's over--then . . ."

Sometimes she thought with a small dart of fear: "What then?" But

she put the thought from her mind. When the war was over,

everything would be settled, somehow. If Ashley loved her, he

simply couldn't go on living with Melanie.

But then, a divorce was unthinkable; and Ellen and Gerald, staunch

Catholics that they were, would never permit her to marry a

divorced man. It would mean leaving the Church! Scarlett thought