In spite of her choked-back tears, Scarlett thrilled to the never-

failing magic of her mother's touch, to the faint fragrance of

lemon verbena sachet that came from her rustling silk dress. To

Scarlett, there was something breath-taking about Ellen O'Hara, a

miracle that lived in the house with her and awed her and charmed

and soothed her.

Gerald helped his wife into the carriage and gave orders to the

coachman to drive carefully. Toby, who had handled Gerald's

horses for twenty years, pushed out his lips in mute indignation

at being told how to conduct his own business. Driving off, with

Mammy beside him, each was a perfect picture of pouting African

disapproval.

"If I didn't do so much for those trashy Slatterys that they'd

have to pay money for elsewhere," fumed Gerald, "they'd be willing

to sell me their miserable few acres of swamp bottom, and the

County would be well rid of them." Then, brightening, in

anticipation of one of his practical jokes: "Come daughter, let's

go tell Pork that instead of buying Dilcey, I've sold him to John

Wilkes."

He tossed the reins of his horse to a small pickaninny standing

near and started up the steps. He had already forgotten

Scarlett's heartbreak and his mind was only on plaguing his valet.

Scarlett slowly climbed the steps after him, her feet leaden. She

thought that, after all, a mating between herself and Ashley could

be no queerer than that of her father and Ellen Robillard O'Hara.

As always, she wondered how her loud, insensitive father had

managed to marry a woman like her mother, for never were two

people further apart in birth, breeding and habits of mind.

CHAPTER III

Ellen O'Hara was thirty-two years old, and, according to the

standards of her day, she was a middle-aged woman, one who had

borne six children and buried three. She was a tall woman,

standing a head higher than her fiery little husband, but she

moved with such quiet grace in her swaying hoops that the height

attracted no attention to itself. Her neck, rising from the black

taffeta sheath of her basque, was creamy-skinned, rounded and

slender, and it seemed always tilted slightly backward by the

weight of her luxuriant hair in its net at the back of her head.

From her French mother, whose parents had fled Haiti in the

Revolution of 1791, had come her slanting dark eyes, shadowed by

inky lashes, and her black hair; and from her father, a soldier of

Napoleon, she had her long straight nose and her square-cut jaw

that was softened by the gentle curving of her cheeks. But only

from life could Ellen's face have acquired its look of pride that

had no haughtiness, its graciousness, its melancholy and its utter

lack of humor.

She would have been a strikingly beautiful woman had there been

any glow in her eyes, any responsive warmth in her smile or any

spontaneity in her voice that fell with gentle melody on the ears

of her family and her servants. She spoke in the soft slurring

voice of the coastal Georgian, liquid of vowels, kind to

consonants and with the barest trace of French accent. It was a

voice never raised in command to a servant or reproof to a child

but a voice that was obeyed instantly at Tara, where her husband's

blustering and roaring were quietly disregarded.

As far back as Scarlett could remember, her mother had always been

the same, her voice soft and sweet whether in praising or in

reproving, her manner efficient and unruffled despite the daily

emergencies of Gerald's turbulent household, her spirit always

calm and her back unbowed, even in the deaths of her three baby

sons. Scarlett had never seen her mother's back touch the back of

any chair on which she sat. Nor had she ever seen her sit down

without a bit of needlework in her hands, except at mealtime,

while attending the sick or while working at the bookkeeping of

the plantation. It was delicate embroidery if company were

present, but at other times her hands were occupied with Gerald's

ruffled shirts, the girls' dresses or garments for the slaves.

Scarlett could not imagine her mother's hands without her gold

thimble or her rustling figure unaccompanied by the small negro

girl whose sole function in life was to remove basting threads and

carry the rosewood sewing box from room to room, as Ellen moved

about the house superintending the cooking, the cleaning and the

wholesale clothes-making for the plantation.

She had never seen her mother stirred from her austere placidity,

nor her personal appointments anything but perfect, no matter what

the hour of day or night. When Ellen was dressing for a ball or

for guests or even to go to Jonesboro for Court Day, it frequently

required two hours, two maids and Mammy to turn her out to her own

satisfaction; but her swift toilets in times of emergency were

amazing.

Scarlett, whose room lay across the hall from her mother's, knew

from babyhood the soft sound of scurrying bare black feet on the

hardwood floor in the hours of dawn, the urgent tappings on her

mother's door, and the muffled, frightened negro voices that

whispered of sickness and birth and death in the long row of

whitewashed cabins in the quarters. As a child, she often had

crept to the door and, peeping through the tiniest crack, had seen

Ellen emerge from the dark room, where Gerald's snores were

rhythmic and untroubled, into the flickering light of an upheld

candle, her medicine case under her arm, her hair smoothed neatly

place, and no button on her basque unlooped.

It had always been so soothing to Scarlett to hear her mother

whisper, firmly but compassionately, as she tiptoed down the hall:

"Hush, not so loudly. You will wake Mr. O'Hara. They are not

sick enough to die."

Yes, it was good to creep back into bed and know that Ellen was

abroad in the night and everything was right.

In the mornings, after all-night sessions at births and deaths,

when old Dr. Fontaine and young Dr. Fontaine were both out on

calls and could not be found to help her, Ellen presided at the

breakfast table as usual, her dark eyes circled with weariness but

her voice and manner revealing none of the strain. There was a

steely quality under her stately gentleness that awed the whole

household, Gerald as well as the girls, though he would have died

rather than admit it.

Sometimes when Scarlett tiptoed at night to kiss her tall mother's

cheek, she looked up at the mouth with its too short, too tender

upper lip, a mouth too easily hurt by the world, and wondered if