I do not belong in this mad present of killing and I fear I will

not fit into any future, try though I may. Nor will you, my dear,

for you and I are of the same blood. I do not know what the

future will bring, but it cannot be as beautiful or as satisfying

as the past.

"I lie and look at the boys sleeping near me and I wonder if the

twins or Alex or Cade think these same thoughts. I wonder if they

know they are fighting for a Cause that was lost the minute the

first shot was fired, for our Cause is really our own way of

living and that is gone already. But I do not think they think

these things and they are lucky.

"I had not thought of this for us when I asked you to marry me. I

had thought of life going on at Twelve Oaks as it had always done,

peacefully, easily, unchanging. We are alike, Melanie, loving the

same quiet things, and I saw before us a long stretch of

uneventful years in which to read, hear music and dream. But not

this! Never this! That this could happen to us all, this

wrecking of old ways, this bloody slaughter and hate! Melanie,

nothing is worth it--States' Rights, nor slaves, nor cotton.

Nothing is worth what is happening to us now and what may happen,

for if the Yankees whip us the future will be one of incredible

horror. And, my dear, they may yet whip us.

"I should not write those words. I should not even think them.

But you have asked me what was in my heart, and the fear of defeat

Is there. Do you remember at the barbecue, the day our engagement

was announced, that a man named Butler, a Charlestonian by his

accent, nearly caused a fight by his remarks about the ignorance

of Southerners? Do you recall how the twins wanted to shoot him

because he said we had few foundries and factories, mills and

ships, arsenals and machine shops? Do you recall how he said the

Yankee fleet could bottle us up so tightly we could not ship out

our cotton? He was right. We are fighting the Yankees' new

rifles with Revolutionary War muskets, and soon the blockade will

be too tight for even medical supplies to slip in. We should have

paid heed to cynics like Butler who knew, instead of statesmen who

felt--and talked. He said, in effect, that the South had nothing

with which to wage war but cotton and arrogance. Our cotton is

worthless and what he called arrogance is all that is left. But I

call that arrogance matchless courage. If--"

But Scarlett carefully folded up the letter without finishing it

and thrust it back into the envelope, too bored to read further.

Besides, the tone of the letter vaguely depressed her with its

foolish talk of defeat. After all, she wasn't reading Melanie's

mail to learn Ashley's puzzling and uninteresting ideas. She had

had to listen to enough of them when he sat on the porch at Tara

In days gone by.

All she wanted to know was whether he wrote impassioned letters to

his wife. So far he had not. She had read every letter in the

writing box and there was nothing in any one of them that a

brother might not have written to a sister. They were

affectionate, humorous, discursive, but not the letters of a

lover. Scarlett had received too many ardent love letters herself

not to recognize the authentic note of passion when she saw it.

And that note was missing. As always after her secret readings, a

feeling of smug satisfaction enveloped her, for she felt certain

that Ashley still loved her. And always she wondered sneeringly

why Melanie did not realize that Ashley only loved her as a

friend. Melanie evidently found nothing lacking in her husband's

messages but Melanie had had no other man's love letters with

which to compare Ashley's."

"He writes such crazy letters," Scarlett thought. "If ever any

husband of mine wrote me such twaddle-twaddle, he'd certainly hear

from me! Why, even Charlie wrote better letters than these."

She flipped back the edges of the letters, looking at the dates,

remembering their contents. In them there were no fine

descriptive pages of bivouacs and charges such as Darcy Meade

wrote his parents or poor Dallas McLure had written his old-maid

sisters, Misses Faith and Hope. The Meades and McLures proudly

read these letters all over the neighborhood, and Scarlett had

frequently felt a secret shame that Melanie had no such letters

from Ashley to read aloud at sewing circles.