Insulted. And they were remembering graves.

Everything in their old world had changed but the old forms. The

old usages went on, must go on, for the forms were all that were

left to them. They were holding tightly to the things they knew

best and loved best in the old days, the leisured manners, the

courtesy, the pleasant casualness in human contacts and, most of

all, the protecting attitude of the men toward their women. True

to the tradition in which they had been reared, the men were

courteous and tender and they almost succeeded in creating an

atmosphere of sheltering their women from all that was harsh and

unfit for feminine eyes. That, thought Scarlett, was the height of

absurdity, for there was little, now, which even the most

cloistered women had not seen and known in the last five years.

They had nursed the wounded, closed dying eyes, suffered war and

fire and devastation, known terror and flight and starvation.

But, no matter what sights they had seen, what menial tasks they

had done and would have to do, they remained ladies and gentlemen,

royalty in exile--bitter, aloof, incurious, kind to one another,

diamond hard, as bright and brittle as the crystals of the broken

chandelier over their heads. The old days had gone but these

people would go their ways as if the old days still existed,

charming, leisurely, determined not to rush and scramble for

pennies as the Yankees did, determined to part with none of the old

ways.

Scarlett knew that she, too, was greatly changed. Otherwise she

could not have done the things she had done since she was last in

Atlanta; otherwise she would not now be contemplating doing what

she desperately hoped to do. But there was a difference in their

hardness and hers and just what the difference was, she could not,

for the moment, tell. Perhaps it was that there was nothing she

would not do, and there were so many things these people would

rather die than do. Perhaps it was that they were without hope but

still smiling at life, bowing gracefully and passing it by. And

this Scarlett could not do.

She could not ignore life. She had to live it and it was too

brutal, too hostile, for her even to try to gloss over its

harshness with a smile. Of the sweetness and courage and

unyielding pride of her friends, Scarlett saw nothing. She saw

only a silly stiff-neckedness which observed facts but smiled and

refused to look them in the face.

As she stared at the dancers, flushed from the reel, she wondered

If things drove them as she was driven, dead lovers, maimed

husbands, children who were hungry, acres slipping away, beloved

roofs that sheltered strangers. But, of course, they were driven!

She knew their circumstances only a little less thoroughly than she

knew her own. Their losses had been her losses, their privations

her privations, their problems her same problems. Yet they had

reacted differently to them. The faces she was seeing in the room

were not faces; they were masks, excellent masks which would never

drop.

But if they were suffering as acutely from brutal circumstances as

she was--and they were--how could they maintain this air of gaiety

and lightness of heart? Why, indeed, should they even try to do