“Only this. I have a deep and impersonal admiration for your endurance, Scarlett, and I do not like to see your spirit crushed beneath too many millstones. There's Tara. That's a man-sized job in itself. There's your sick father added on. He'll never be any help to you. And the girls and the darkies. And now you've taken on a husband and probably Miss Pittypat, too. You've enough burdens without Ashley Wilkes and his family on your hands.”
“He's not on my hands. He helps-”
“Oh, for God's sake,” he said impatiently. “Don't let's have any more of that. He's no help. He's on your hands and he'll be on them, or on somebody's, till he dies. Personally, I'm sick of him as a topic of conversation… How much money do you want?”
Vituperative words rushed to her lips. After all his insults, after dragging from her those things which were most precious to her and trampling on them, he still thought she would take his money!
But the words were checked unspoken. How wonderful it would be to scorn his offer and order him out of the store! But only the truly rich and the truly secure could afford this luxury. So long as she was poor, just so long would she have to endure such scenes as this. But when she was rich-oh, what a beautiful warming thought that was! – when she was rich, she wouldn't stand anything she didn't like, do without anything she desired or even be polite to people unless they pleased her.
I shall tell them all to go to Halifax, she thought, and Rhett Butler will be the first one!
The pleasure in the thought brought a sparkle into her green eyes and a half-smile to her lips. Rhett smiled too.
“You're a pretty person, Scarlett,” he said. “Especially when you are meditating devilment. And just for the sight of that dimple I'll buy you a baker's dozen of mules if you want them.”
The front door opened and the counter boy entered, picking his teeth with a quill. Scarlett rose, pulled her shawl about her and tied her bonnet strings firmly under her chin. Her mind was made up.
“Are you busy this afternoon? Can you come with me now?” she asked.
“Where?”
“I want you to drive to the mill with me. I promised Frank I wouldn't drive out of town by myself.”
“To the mill in this rain?”
“Yes, I want to buy that mill now, before you change your mind.”
He laughed so loudly the boy behind the counter started and looked at him curiously.
“Have you forgotten you are married? Mrs. Kennedy can't afford to be seen driving out into the country with that Butler reprobate, who isn't received in the best parlors. Have you forgotten your reputation?”
“Reputation, fiddle-dee-dee! I want that mill before you change your mind or Frank finds out that I'm buying it. Don't be a slow poke, Rhett. What's a little rain? Let's hurry.”
That sawmill! Frank groaned every time he thought of it, cursing himself for ever mentioning it to her. It was bad enough for her to sell her earrings to Captain Butler (of all people!) and buy the mill without even consulting her own husband about it, but it was worse still that she did not turn it over to him to operate. That looked bad. As if she did not trust him or his judgment.
Frank, in common with all men he knew, felt that a wife should be guided by her husband's superior knowledge, should accept his opinions in full and have none of her own. He would have given most women their own way. Women were such funny little creatures and it never hurt to humor their small whims. Mild and gentle by nature, it was not in him to deny a wife much. He would have enjoyed gratifying the foolish notions of some soft little person and scolding her lovingly for her stupidity and extravagance. But the things Scarlett set her mind on were unthinkable.
That sawmill, for example. It was the shock of his life when she told him with a sweet smile, in answer to his questions, that she intended to run it herself. “Go into the lumber business myself,” was the way she put it. Frank would never forget the horror of that moment. Go into business for herself! It was unthinkable. There were no women in business in Atlanta. In fact, Frank had never heard of a woman in business anywhere. If women were so unfortunate as to be compelled to make a little money to assist their families in these hard times, they made it in quiet womanly ways-baking as Mrs. Merriwether was doing, or painting china and sewing and keeping boarders, like Mrs. Elsing and Fanny, or teaching school like Mrs. Meade or giving music lessons like Mrs. Bonnell. These ladies made money but they kept themselves at home while they did it, as a woman should. But for a woman to leave the protection of her home and venture out into the rough world of men, competing with them in business, rubbing shoulders with them, being exposed to insult and gossip… Especially when she wasn't forced to do it, when she had a husband amply able to provide for her!
Frank had hoped she was only teasing or playing a joke on him, a joke of questionable taste, but he soon found she meant what she said. She did operate the sawmill. She rose earlier than he did to drive out Peachtree road and frequently did not come home until long after he had locked up the store and returned to Aunt Pitty's for supper. She drove the long miles to the mill with only the disapproving Uncle Peter to protect her and the woods were full of free niggers and Yankee riffraff. Frank couldn't go with her, the store took all of his time, but when he protested, she said shortly: “If I don't keep an eye on that slick scamp, Johnson, he'll steal my lumber and sell it and put the money in his pocket. When I can get a good man to run the mill for me, then I won't have to go out there so often. Then I can spend my time in town selling lumber.”
Selling lumber in town! That was worst of all. She frequently did take a day off from the mill and peddle lumber and, on those days, Frank wished he could hide in the dark back room of his store and see no one. His wife selling lumber!
And people were talking terrible about her. Probably about him too, for permitting her to behave in so unwomanly a fashion. It embarrassed him to face his customers over the counter and hear them say: “I saw Mrs. Kennedy a few minutes ago over at…” Everyone took pains to tell him what she did. Everyone was talking about what happened over where the new hotel was being built. Scarlett had driven up just as Tommy Wellburn was buying some lumber from another man and she climbed down out of the buggy among the rough Irish masons who were laying the foundations, and told Tommy briefly that he was being cheated. She said her lumber was better and cheaper too, and to prove it she ran up a long column of figures in her head and gave him an estimate then and there. It was bad enough that she had intruded herself among strange rough workmen, but it was still worse for a woman to show publicly that she could do mathematics like that. When Tommy accepted her estimate and gave her the order, Scarlett had not taken her departure speedily and meekly but had idled about, talking to Johnnie Gallegher, the foreman of the Irish workers, a hard-bitten little gnome of a man who had a very bad reputation. The town talked about it for weeks.
On top of everything else, she was actually making money out of the mill, and no man could feel right about a wife who succeeded in so unwomanly an activity. Nor did she turn over the money or any part of it to him to use in the store. Most of it went to Tara and she wrote interminable letters to Will Benteen telling him just how it should be spent. Furthermore, she told Frank that if the repairs at Tara could ever be completed, she intended to lend out her money on mortgages.
“My! My!” moaned Frank whenever he thought of this. A woman had no business even knowing what a mortgage was.
Scarlett was full of plans these days and each one of them seemed worse to Frank than the previous one. She even talked of building a saloon on the property where her warehouse had been until Sherman burned it. Frank was no teetotaler but he feverishly protested against the idea. Owning saloon property was a bad business, an unlucky business, almost as bad as renting to a house of prostitution. Just why it was bad, he could not explain to her and to his lame arguments she said “Fiddle-dee-dee!”
“Saloons are always good tenants. Uncle Henry said so,” she told him. “They always pay their rent and, look here, Frank, I could put up a cheap salon out of poor-grade lumber I can't sell and get good rent for it, and with the rent money and the money from the mill and what I could get from mortgages,