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 green without 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 of Tara, 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 her decorous 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.

Margaret Mitchell