“Well, who cares? Listen, Rhett, and see if this doesn’t sound like good business to you. Frank told me about this man who has a sawmill, a little one out Peachtree road, and be wants to sell it. He’s got to have cash money pretty quick and he’ll sell it cheap. There aren’t many sawmills around here now, and the way people are rebuilding—why, we could sell lumber sky high. The man will stay and run the mill for a wage. Frank told me about it. Frank would buy the mill himself if he had the money. I guess he was intending buying it with the money he gave me for the taxes.”
“Poor Frank! What is he going to say when you tell him you’ve bought it yourself right out from under him? And how are you going to explain my lending you the money without compromising your reputation?”
Scarlett had given no thought to this, so intent was she upon the money the mill would bring in.
“Well, I just won’t tell him.”
“He’ll know you didn’t pick it off a bush.”
“I’ll tell him—why, yes, I’ll tell him I sold you my diamond earbobs. And I will give them to you, too. That’ll be my collat—my whatchucallit.”
“I wouldn’t take your earbobs.”
“I don’t want them. I don’t like them. They aren’t really mine, anyway.”
“Whose are they?”
Her mind went swiftly back to the still hot noon with the country hush deep about Tara and the dead man in blue sprawled in the hall.
“They were left with me—by someone who’s dead. They’re mine all right. Take them. I don’t want them. I’d rather have the money for them.”
“Good Lord!” he cried impatiently. “Don’t you ever think of anything but money?”
“No,” she replied frankly, turning hard green eyes upon him. “And if you’d been through what I have, you wouldn’t either. I’ve found out that money is the most important thing in the world and, as God is my witness, I don’t ever intend to be without it again.”
She remembered the hot sun, the soft red earth under her sick head, the niggery smell of the cabin behind the ruins of Twelve Oaks, remembered the refrain her heart had beaten: I’ll never be hungry again. I’ll never be hungry again,”
I’m going to have money some day, lots of it, so I can have anything I want to eat. And then there’ll never be any hominy or dried peas on my table. And I’m going to have pretty clothes and all of them are going to be silk—”
“All?”
“All,” she said shortly, not even troubling to blush at his implication. “I’m going to have money enough so the Yankees can never take Tara away from me. And I’m going to have a new roof for Tara and a new barn and fine mules for plowing and more cotton than you ever saw. And Wade isn’t ever going to know what it means to do without the things he needs. Never! He’s going to have everything in the world. And all my family, they aren’t ever going to be hungry again. I mean it. Every word. You don’t understand, you’re such a selfish hound. You’ve never had the Carpetbaggers trying to drive you out. You’ve never been cold and ragged and had to break your back to keep from starving!”
He said quietly: “I was in the Confederate Army for eight months. I don’t know any better place for starving.”
“The army! Bah! You’ve never had to pick cotton and weed corn. You’ve— Don’t you laugh at me!”
His hands were on hers again as her voice rose harshly.
“I wasn’t laughing at you. I was laughing at the difference in what you look and what you really are. And I was remembering the first time I ever saw you, at the barbecue at the Wilkes’. You had on a green dress and little green slippers, and you were knee deep in men and quite full of yourself. I’ll wager you didn’t know then how many pennies were in a dollar. There was only one idea in your whole mind then and that was ensnaring Ash—”
She jerked her hands away from him.
“Rhett, if we are to get on at all, you’ll have to stop talking about Ashley Wilkes. We’ll always fall out about him, because you can’t understand him.”
“I suppose you understand him like a book,” said Rhett maliciously. “No, Scarlett, if I am to lend you the money I reserve the right to discuss Ashley Wilkes in any terms I care to. I waive the right to collect interest on my loan but not that right. And there are a number of things about that young man I’d like to know.”
“I do not have to discuss him with you,” she answered shortly.
“Oh, but you do! I hold the purse strings, you see. Some day when you are rich, you can have the power to do the same to others. ... It’s obvious that you still care about him—”
“I do not.”
“Oh, it’s so obvious from the way you rush to his defense. You—”
“I won’t stand having my friends sneered at.”
“Well, we’ll let that pass for the moment. Does he still care for you or did Rock Island make him forget? Or perhaps he’s learned to appreciate what a jewel of a wife he has?”
At the mention of Melanie, Scarlett began to breathe hard and could scarcely restrain herself from crying out the whole story, that only honor kept Ashley with Melanie. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it.
“Oh. So he still hasn’t enough sense to appreciate Mrs. Wilkes? And the rigors of prison didn’t dim his ardor for you?”
“I see no need to discuss the subject.”
“I wish to discuss it,” said Rhett. There was a low note in his voice which Scarlett did not understand but did not like to hear. “And, by God, I will discuss it and I expect you to answer me. So he’s still in love with you?”
“Well, what if he is?” cried Scarlett, goaded. “I don’t care to discuss him with you because you can’t understand him or his kind of love. The only kind of love you know about is just—well, the kind you carry on with creatures like that Watling woman.”
“Oh,” said Rhett softly. “So I am only capable of carnal lusts?”
“Well, you know it’s true.”
“Now I appreciate your hesitance in discussing the matter with me. My unclean hands and lips besmirch the purity of his love.”
“Well, yes—something like that.”
“I’m interested in this pure love—”
“Don’t be so nasty, Rhett Butler. If you are vile enough to think there’s ever been anything wrong between us—”
“Oh, the thought never entered my head, really. That’s why it all interests me. Just why hasn’t there been anything wrong between you?”