Gone with the Wind: Chapters 8–16

Scarlett submitted meekly to being carried toward the carriage and also to the peremptory manner in which Uncle Peter criticized her and Prissy.

She would never have arrived at this eminence so early in life had not the exigencies of war and the demands of the commissary department on Tara made it impossible for Ellen to spare Mammy or Dilcey or even Rosa or Teena.

...convalescents limped about on crutches, usually with a solicitous lady at either elbow...

Uncle Henry was a short, pot-bellied, irascible old gentleman with a pink face, a shock of long silver hair and an utter lack of patience with feminine timidities and vaporings.

Scarlett exercised the same charms as Melanie but with a studied artistry and consummate skill.

Sometimes Scarlett found it hard to dissemble her feelings, for she still thought Aunt Pitty the silliest of old ladies and her vagueness and vaporings irritated her unendurably.

The two faces looked down on the scene, two faces as different as could be possible in two men at the helm of so momentous an undertaking: Davis with the flat cheeks and cold eyes of an ascetic, his thin proud lips set firmly; Stephens with dark burning eyes deep socketed in a face that had known nothing but sickness and pain and had triumphed over them with humor and with fire — two faces that were greatly loved.

"We must all give grateful thanks to the charming ladies whose indefatigable and patriotic efforts have made this bazaar not only a pecuniary success," he began, "but have transformed this rough hall into a bower of loveliness, a fit garden for the charming rosebuds I see about me."

"We must all give grateful thanks to the charming ladies whose indefatigable and patriotic efforts have made this bazaar not only a pecuniary success," he began, "but have transformed this rough hall into a bower of loveliness, a fit garden for the charming rosebuds I see about me."

She had learned to say, "I won't think of this or that bothersome thought now. I'll think about it tomorrow." Generally when tomorrow came, the thought either did not occur at all or it was so attenuated by the delay it was not very troublesome.

She could and did love Ashley with the last breath in her body, but that did not prevent her from inveigling other men into asking to marry her.

In fact, she could endure the hospital with equanimity now because it was a perfect happy hunting ground.

It had been her experience that the liar was the hottest to defend his veracity, the coward his courage, the ill-bred his gentlemanliness, and the cad his honor.

I execrate these vampires who are sucking the lifeblood of the men who follow Robert Lee — these men who are making the very name of blockader a stench in the nostrils of all patriotic men.

Old men growled in their beards, and Mrs. Merriwether who feared nothing rose slightly in her carriage and said clearly: "Speculator!" in a tone that made the word the foulest and most venomous of epithets.