The nurse was discharged and thereafter followed a series of nurses who remained, at the most, a week. None of them was good enough to satisfy the exacting requirements Rhett laid down.
Mammy likewise viewed with displeasure the nurses that came and went, for she was jealous of any strange negro and saw no reason why she could not care for the baby and Wade and Ella, too.
But Mammy was showing her age and rheumatism was slowing her lumbering tread.
Rhett lacked the courage to cite these reasons for employing another nurse.
He told her instead that a man of his position could not afford to have only one nurse.
It did not look well.
He would hire two others to do the drudgery and leave her as Mammy-in-chief.
This Mammy understood very well.
More servants were a credit to her position as well as Rhett's.
But she would not, she told him firmly, have any trashy free issue niggers in her nursery.
So Rhett sent to Tara for Prissy.
He knew her shortcomings but, after all, she was a family darky.
And Uncle Peter produced a great-niece named Lou who had belonged to one of Miss Pitty's Burr cousins.
Even before Scarlett was able to be about again, she noticed Rhett's pre-occupation with the baby and was somewhat nettled and embarrassed at his pride in her in front of callers.
It was all very well for a man to love his child but she felt there was something unmanly in the display of such love.
He should be offhand and careless, as other men were.
"You are making a fool of yourself," she said irritably, "and I don't see why."
"No?
Well, you wouldn't.
The reason is that she's the first person who's ever belonged utterly to me."
"She belongs to me, too!"
"No, you have two other children.
She's mine."
"Great balls of fire!" said Scarlett.
"I had the baby, didn't I?
Besides, honey, I belong to you."
Rhett looked at her over the black head of the child and smiled oddly.
"Do you, my dear?"
Only the entrance of Melanie stopped one of those swift hot quarrels which seemed to spring up so easily between them these days.
Scarlett swallowed her wrath and watched Melanie take the baby.
The name agreed upon for the child was Eugenie Victoria, but that afternoon Melanie unwittingly bestowed a name that clung, even as "Pittypat" had blotted out all memory of Sarah Jane.
Rhett leaning over the child had said:
"Her eyes are going to be pea green."
"Indeed they are not," cried Melanie indignantly, forgetting that Scarlett's eyes were almost that shade.
"They are going to be blue, like Mr. O'Hara's eyes, as blue as--as blue as the bonnie blue flag."
"Bonnie Blue Butler," laughed Rhett, taking the child from her and peering more closely into the small eyes.
And Bonnie she became until even her parents did not recall that she had been named for two queens.
CHAPTER LI
When she was finally able to go out again, Scarlett had Lou lace her into stays as tightly as the strings would pull.
Then she passed the tape measure about her waist.
Twenty inches!
She groaned aloud.
That was what having babies did to your figure!
Her waist was a large as Aunt Pitty's, as large as Mammy's.
"Pull them tighter, Lou.
See if you can't make it eighteen and a half inches or I can't get into any of my dresses."
"It'll bust de strings," said Lou.
"Yo' wais' jes' done got bigger, Miss Scarlett, an' dar ain' nuthin' ter do 'bout it."
"There is something to do about it," thought Scarlett as she ripped savagely at the seams of her dress to let out the necessary inches.
"I just won't have any more babies."