It's only decent that the families of the men Captain Butler saved should call.
When you come right down to it, I haven't got so much against Butler.
He showed himself a fine man that night he saved our hides.
It's Scarlett who sticks under my tail like a cocklebur.
She's a sight too smart for her own good.
Well, I've got to call.
Scallawag or not, Scarlett is my niece by marriage, after all.
I was aiming to call this afternoon."
"I'll go with you, Henry.
Dolly will be fit to be tied when she hears I've gone.
Wait till I get one more drink."
"No, we'll get a drink off Captain Butler.
I'll say this for him, he always has good licker."
Rhett had said that the Old Guard would never surrender and he was right.
He knew how little significance there was to the few calls made upon them, and he knew why the calls were made.
The families of the men who had been in the ill-starred Klan foray did call first, but called with obvious infrequency thereafter.
And they did not invite the Rhett Butlers to their homes.
Rhett said they would not have come at all, except for fear of violence at the hands of Melanie.
Where he got this idea, Scarlett did not know but she dismissed it with the contempt it deserved.
For what possible influence could Melanie have on people like Mrs. Elsing and Mrs. Merriwether?
That they did not call again worried her very little; in fact, their absence was hardly noticed, for her suite was crowded with guests of another type.
"New people," established Atlantians called them, when they were not calling them something less polite.
There were many "new people" staying at the National Hotel who, like Rhett and Scarlett, were waiting for their houses to be completed.
They were gay, wealthy people, very much like Rhett's New Orleans friends, elegant of dress, free with their money, vague as to their antecedents.
All the men were Republicans and were "in Atlanta on business connected with the state government."
Just what the business was, Scarlett did not know and did not trouble to learn.
Rhett could have told her exactly what it was--the same business that buzzards have with dying animals.
They smelled death from afar and were drawn unerringly to it, to gorge themselves.
Government of Georgia by its own citizens was dead, the state was helpless and the adventurers were swarming in.
The wives of Rhett's Scallawag and Carpetbagger friends called in droves and so did the "new people" she had met when she sold lumber for their homes.
Rhett said that, having done business with them, she should receive them and, having received them, she found them pleasant company.
They wore lovely clothes and never talked about the war or hard times, but confined the conversation to fashions, scandals and whist.
Scarlett had never played cards before and she took to whist with joy, becoming a good player in a short time.
Whenever she was at the hotel there was a crowd of whist players in her suite.
But she was not often in her suite these days, for she was too busy with the building of her new house to be bothered with callers.
These days she did not much care whether she had callers or not.
She wanted to delay her social activities until the day when the house was finished and she could emerge as the mistress of Atlanta's largest mansion, the hostess of the town's most elaborate entertainments.
Through the long warm days she watched her red stone and gray shingle house rise grandly, to tower above any other house on Peachtree Street.
Forgetful of the store and the mills, she spent her time on the lot, arguing with carpenters, bickering with masons, harrying the contractor.
As the walls went swiftly up she thought with satisfaction that, when finished, it would be larger and finer looking than any other house in town.
It would be even more imposing than the near-by James residence which had just been purchased for the official mansion of Governor Bullock.
The governor's mansion was brave with jigsaw work on banisters and eaves, but the intricate scrollwork on Scarlett's house put the mansion to shame.
The mansion had a ballroom, but it looked like a billiard table compared with the enormous room that covered the entire third floor of Scarlett's house.
In fact, her house had more of everything than the mansion, or any other house in town for that matter, more cupolas and turrets and towers and balconies and lightning rods and far more windows with colored panes.
A veranda encircled the entire house, and four flights of steps on the four sides of the building led up to it.
The yard was wide and green and scattered about it were rustic iron benches, an iron summerhouse, fashionably called a "gazebo" which, Scarlett had been assured, was of pure Gothic design, and two large iron statues, one a stag and the other a mastiff as large as a Shetland pony.
To Wade and Ella, a little dazzled by the size, splendor and fashionable dark gloom of their new home, these two metal animals were the only cheerful notes.
Within, the house was furnished as Scarlett had desired, with thick red carpeting which ran from wall to wall, red velvet portieres and the newest of highly varnished black-walnut furniture, carved wherever there was an inch for carving and upholstered in such slick horsehair that ladies had to deposit themselves thereon with great care for fear of sliding off.
Everywhere on the walls were gilt-framed mirrors and long pier glasses--as many, Rhett said idly, as there were in Belle Watling's establishment.
Interspread were steel engravings in heavy frames, some of them eight feet long, which Scarlett had ordered especially from New York.