Gone with the Wind / Унесённые ветром

She told herself that the child was merely full of life and there was still time in which to teach her the airs and graces of being attractive to men.

Despite several governesses and two years at the Fayetteville Female Academy, Scarlett’s education was sketchy, but no girl in the County danced more gracefully than she. She knew how to smile so that her dimples leaped, how to look up into a man’s face and then drop her eyes. Most of all she learned how to conceal from men a sharp intelligence beneath a face as sweet and bland as a baby’s.

Ellen tried to teach her the qualities that would make her truly desirable as a wife.

“You must be more gentle, dear,” Ellen told her daughter. “You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls.”

At sixteen, thanks to Mammy and Ellen, Scarlett looked sweet and charming, but she was, in reality, self-willed, vain and obstinate.

She had the passions of her Irish father. And Mammy and Ellen sometimes feared they would not be able to conceal her wrong qualities until she had made a good match. But Scarlett intended to marry – and marry Ashley – and she was willing to appear shy and meek, if those were the qualities that attracted men. She knew only that if she did or said thus- and-so, men would immediately respond with the thus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult, for mathematics was the one subject that had come easy to Scarlett in her schooldays.

If she knew little about men’s minds, she knew even less about the minds of women, for they interested her less. She had never had a girl friend, and she never felt any lack on that account. To her, all women, including her two sisters, were natural enemies hunting for the same prey – man.

All women with the one exception of her mother.

To her, Ellen represented the complete security. She knew that her mother was the source of justice, truth, loving tenderness and profound wisdom – a great lady.

Scarlett wanted very much to be like her mother. The only difficulty was that by being just and truthful and tender and unselfish, one missed most of the joys of life, and certainly many beaux. And life was too short to miss such pleasant things. Some day when she was married to Ashley and old, some day when she had time for it, she intended to be like Ellen.