She smiled entrancingly at Harry Connington, her friend Sylvia’s husband. “You must have found some elixir, Harry, you look ten years younger than you did last time I saw you.” She watched with malicious amusement as Harry sucked in his stomach. His face turned red, then faintly purple before he abandoned the effort to hold it in. Scarlett laughed aloud, then moved away.

A burst of laughter caught her attention, and she drifted towards the trio of men who were its source. She’d like very much to hear something funny, even if it was one of those jokes that ladies had to pretend not to understand.

“. . . so I says to myself, ‘Bill, one man’s panic is another man’s profit, and I know which one of those men old Bill’s going to be.’ ”

Scarlett started to turn away. She wanted to have a good time tonight, and talking about the Panic wasn’t her idea of fun. Still, maybe she’d learn something. She was smarter when she was sound asleep than Bill Weller was on his best day, she was sure of that. If he was making money out of the Panic, she wanted to know how he was doing it. Quietly she stepped closer.

“. . . these dumb Southerners, they been a problem for me ever since I come down here,” Bill was confessing. “You just can’t do nothing with a man who don’t have natural human greed, so all the triple-your-money bond deals and certificates for gold mines that I turned loose on them laid a big egg. They was working harder than any nigger ever did and putting by every nickel they earned for the next rainy day. Turned out that plenty of ’em had a boxful of bonds and such already. From the Confederate government.” Bill’s booming laugh led the laughter of the other men.

Scarlett was fuming. “Dumb Southerners” indeed! Her own darling Pa had a boxful of Confederate bonds. So did all the good people in Clayton County. She tried to walk away, but she was hemmed in by people behind her who’d also been attracted by the laughter in the group around Bill Weller. “I got the picture after a while,” Weller went on. “They just didn’t put much trust in paper. Nor nothing else that I tried, neither. I sent out medicine shows and lightning rods and all the sure-fire money-makers, but none of them so much as struck a spark. I tell you, boys, it hurt my pride.” He made a lugubrious face, then grinned widely, showing three large gold molars.

“I don’t have to tell you that me and Lula wasn’t exactly going to go wanting if I didn’t come up with something. In the good, fat days when the Republicans had Georgia in hand, I piled up enough from those railroad contracts the boys voted me so that we could have lived high on the hog even if I’d been fool enough to actually go out and build the railroads. But I like to keep my hand in, and Lula was starting to fret because I was around the house too much, not having any business to tend to. Then—glory be—along come the Panic, and all the Rebs grabbed their savings out of the banks and put the money in their mattresses. Every house—even the shacks—was a golden opportunity I just couldn’t let pass me by.”

“Stop your gassing, Bill, what did you come up with? I’m getting thirsty waiting for you to finish patting yourself on the back and get to the point.” Amos Bart punctuated his impatience with a practiced spit that fell short of its targeted spittoon.

Scarlett was feeling impatient, too. Impatient to get away.

“Keep your shirt on, Amos, I’m coming to it. What was the way to get in those mattresses? I ain’t the revival-preacher kind, I like to sit behind my desk and let my employees do the hustling. That’s just what I was doing, sitting in my leather swivel chair, when I looked out my window and saw a funeral going by. It was like lightning striking. There ain’t a roof in Georgia that don’t have some dearly departed once lived under it.”

Scarlett stared with horror at Bill Weller as he described the fraud that was adding to his riches. “The mothers and widows are the easiest, and there’s more of them than anything else. They don’t blink an eye when my boys tell them that the Confederate Veterans are putting up monuments on all the battlefields, and they empty out those mattresses quicker than you can say ‘Abe Lincoln’ to pay for their boy’s name to be carved in the marble.” It was worse than Scarlett could have imagined.

“You sly old fox, Bill, that’s pure genius!” Amos exclaimed, and the men in the group laughed more loudly than before. Scarlett felt as if she were going to be sick. Nonexistent railroads and gold mines had never concerned her, but the mothers and widows Bill Weller was cheating were her own people. He might be sending his men right now to Beatrice Tarleton, or Cathleen Calvert, or Dimity Munroe, or any other woman in Clayton County who had lost a son or a brother or a husband.

Her voice cut through the laughter like a knife. “That’s the most low-down, filthy story I ever heard in my life. You disgust me, Bill Weller. All of you disgust me. What do you know about Southerners—about decent people anywhere? You’ve never had a decent thought or done a decent thing in all your lives!” She pushed with hands outstretched through the thunderstruck men and women who had gathered around Weller, then ran, rubbing her hands on her skirts to wipe off the stain of having touched them.

The dining room and the glittering silver dishes of elaborate food were in front of her; her gorge rose at the mixed smells of rich, greasy sauces and spattered spittoons. She saw in her mind the lamplit table at the Fontaines’, the simple meal of home-cured ham and home-made corn bread and home-grown greens. She belonged with them; they were her people, not these vulgar, trashy, flashy women and men.

Scarlett turned to face Weller and his group. “Dregs!” she yelled. “That’s what you are. Dregs. Get out of my house, get out of my sight, you make me sick!”

Mamie Bart made the mistake of trying to soothe her. “Come on, honey—” she said, holding out her jewelled hand.

Scarlett recoiled before she could be touched. “Especially you, you greasy sow.”

“Well, I never,” Mamie Bart’s voice quavered. “I’m damn well not going to put up with being talked to like this. I wouldn’t stay if you begged me on your knees, Scarlett Butler.”

A shoving, angry stampede began, and in less than ten minutes the rooms were empty of everything except the debris left behind. Scarlett made her way through spilled food and champagne, broken plates and glasses, without looking down. She must keep her head high, the way her mother had taught her. She imagined that she was back at Tara, with a heavy volume of the Waverley novels balanced on her head, and she climbed the stairs with her back as straight as a tree, her chin perfectly perpendicular to her shoulders.

Like a lady. The way her mother had taught her. Her head was swimming and her legs trembled, but she climbed without pausing. A lady never let it show when she was tired or upset.

“High time she did that, and then some,” said the cornetist. The octet had played waltzes from behind the palms for many of Scarlett’s receptions.

One of the violinists spat accurately into a potted palm. “Too late, I say. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.”

Above their heads Scarlett was lying face down on her silkcovered bed, sobbing as if her heart was broken. She had thought she was going to have such a good time.


Later that night, when the house was quiet and dark, Scarlett went downstairs for a drink to help her sleep. All evidence of the party was gone, except for the elaborate flower arrangements and the half-burned candles in the six-armed candelabra on the bare dining room table.

Scarlett lit the candles and blew out her lamp. Why should she skulk around in near-darkness like some kind of thief? It was her house, her brandy, and she could do as she pleased.

She selected a glass, took it and the decanter to the table, sat in the armchair at the head. It was her table, too.

The brandy sent a relaxing warmth through her body. Scarlett sighed. Thank God. Another drink, and my nerves should stop jumping around like they’re doing. She filled the elegant little cordial glass again, tossed the brandy down her throat with a deft twist of the wrist. Mustn’t hurry, she thought, pouring. It’s not ladylike.

She sipped her third drink. How pretty the candlelight was, lovely golden flames reflected in the polished tabletop. The empty glass was pretty, too. Its cut facets made rainbows when she turned it in her fingers.

It was as quiet as the grave. The clink of glass against glass made her jump when she poured the brandy. That proved she needed the drink, didn’t it? She was still too jumpy to sleep.

The candles burned low and the decanter slowly emptied and Scarlett’s usual control over her mind and memory was loosened. This was the room where it had all begun. The table had been bare like this with only candles on it and the silver tray that held brandy decanter and glasses. Rhett was drunk. She’d never seen him really drunk like that, he could always hold his liquor. He was drunk that night, though, and cruel. He said such horrible hurting things to her, and he twisted her arm so that she cried out in pain.

But then . . . then he carried her up to her room and forced himself on her. Except that he didn’t have to force her to accept him. She came alive when he handled her, when he kissed her lips and throat and body. She burned at his touch and she cried out for more and her body arched and strained to meet his again and again . . .

It couldn’t be true. She must have dreamed it, but how could she have dreamed such things when she’d never dreamed they existed?

No lady would ever feel the wild wanting she had felt, no lady would do the things she had done. Scarlett tried to push her thoughts back into the crowded dark corner of her mind where she kept the unbearable and unthinkable. But she’d had too much to drink.