First, she learned that marriage with Rhett was a far different matter from marriage with either Charles or Frank.
They had respected her and been afraid of her temper.
They had begged for favors and if it pleased her, she had bestowed them.
Rhett did not fear her and, she often thought, did not respect her very much either.
What he wanted to do, he did, and if she did not like it, he laughed at her.
She did not love him but he was undoubtedly an exciting person to live with.
The most exciting thing about him was that even in his outbursts of passion which were flavored sometimes with cruelty, sometimes with irritating amusement, he seemed always to be holding himself under restraint, always riding his emotions with a curb bit.
"I guess that's because he isn't really in love with me," she thought and was content enough with the state of affairs.
"I should hate for him to ever turn completely loose in any way."
But still the thought of the possibility teased her curiosity in an exciting way.
Living with Rhett, she learned many new things about him, and she had thought she knew him so well.
She learned that his voice could be as silky as a cat's fur one moment and crisp and crackling with oaths the next.
He could tell, with apparent sincerity and approval, stories of courage and honor and virtue and love in the odd places he had been, and follow them with ribald stories of coldest cynicism.
She knew no man should tell such stories to his wife but they were entertaining and they appealed to something coarse and earthy in her.
He could be an ardent, almost a tender, lover for a brief while, and almost immediately a mocking devil who ripped the lid from her gunpowder temper, fired it and enjoyed the explosion.
She learned that his compliments were always two edged and his tenderest expressions open to suspicion.
In fact, in those two weeks in New Orleans, she learned everything about him except what he really was.
Some mornings he dismissed the maid and brought her the breakfast tray himself and fed her as though she were a child, took the hairbrush from her hand and brushed her long dark hair until it snapped and crackled.
Yet other mornings she was torn rudely out of deep slumber when he snatched all the bed covers from her and tickled her bare feet. Sometimes he listened with dignified interest to details of her businesses, nodding approval at her sagacity, and at other times he called her somewhat dubious tradings scavenging, highway robbery and extortion.
He took her to plays and annoyed her by whispering that God probably didn't approve of such amusements, and to churches and, sotto voce, retailed funny obscenities and then reproved her for laughing.
He encouraged her to speak her mind, to be flippant and daring.
She picked up from him the gift of stinging words and sardonic phrases and learned to relish using them for the power they gave her over other people.
But she did not possess his sense of humor which tempered his malice, nor his smile that jeered at himself even while he was jeering others.
He made her play and she had almost forgotten how.
Life had been so serious and so bitter.
He knew how to play and swept her along with him.
But he never played like a boy; he was a man and no matter what he did, she could never forget it.
She could not look down on him from the heights of womanly superiority, smiling as women have always smiled at the antics of men who are boys at heart.
This annoyed her a little, whenever she thought of it.
It would be pleasant to feel superior to Rhett.
All the other men she had known she could dismiss with a half-contemptuous
"What a child!"
Her father, the Tarleton twins with their love of teasing and their elaborate practical jokes, the hairy little Fontaines with their childish rages, Charles, Frank, all the men who had paid court to her during the war--everyone, in fact, except Ashley.
Only Ashley and Rhett eluded her understanding and her control for they were both adults, and the elements of boyishness were lacking in them.
She did not understand Rhett, nor did she trouble to understand him, though there were things about him which occasionally puzzled her.
There was the way he looked at her sometimes, when he thought she was unaware.
Turning quickly she frequently caught him watching her, an alert, eager, waiting look in his eyes.
"Why do you look at me like that?" she once asked irritably.
"Like a cat at a mouse hole!"
But his face had changed swiftly and he only laughed.
Soon she forgot it and did not puzzle her head about it any more, or about anything concerning Rhett.
He was too unpredictable to bother about and life was very pleasant--except when she thought of Ashley.
Rhett kept her too busy to think of Ashley often.
Ashley was hardly ever in her thoughts during the day but at night when she was tired from dancing or her head was spinning from too much champagne--then she thought of Ashley.
Frequently when she lay drowsily in Rhett's arms with the moonlight streaming over the bed, she thought how perfect life would be if it were only Ashley's arms which held her so closely, if it were only Ashley who drew her black hair across his face and wrapped it about his throat.
Once when she was thinking this, she sighed and turned her head toward the window, and after a moment she felt the heavy arm beneath her neck become like iron, and Rhett's voice spoke in the stillness:
"May God damn your cheating little soul to hell for all eternity!"
And, getting up, he put on his clothes and left the room despite her startled protests and questions.
He reappeared the next morning as she was breakfasting in her room, disheveled, quite drunk and in his worst sarcastic mood, and neither made excuses nor gave an account of his absence.
Scarlett asked no questions and was quite cool to him, as became an injured wife, and when she had finished the meal, she dressed under his bloodshot gaze and went shopping.