On the way home, Scarlett was full of County news.
The hot, dry weather was making the cotton grow so fast you could almost hear it but Will said cotton prices were going to be low this fall.
Suellen was going to have another baby--she spelled this out so the children would not comprehend--and Ella had shown unwonted spirit in biting Suellen's oldest girl.
Though, observed Scarlett, it was no more than little Susie deserved, she being her mother all over again.
But Suellen had become infuriated and they had had an invigorating quarrel that was just like old times.
Wade had killed a water moccasin, all by himself.
'Randa and Camilla Tarleton were teaching school and wasn't that a joke?
Not a one of the Tarletons had ever been able to spell cat!
Betsy Tarleton had married a fat one-armed man from Lovejoy and they and Hetty and Jim Tarleton were raising a good cotton crop at Fairhill.
Mrs. Tarleton had a brood mare and a colt and was as happy as though she had a million dollars.
And there were negroes living in the old Calvert house!
Swarms of them and they actually owned it!
They'd bought it in at the sheriff's sale.
The place was dilapidated and it made you cry to look at it.
No one knew where Cathleen and her no-good husband had gone.
And Alex was to marry Sally, his brother's widow!
Imagine that, after them living in the same house for so many years!
Everybody said it was a marriage of convenience because people were beginning to gossip about them living there alone, since both Old Miss and Young Miss had died.
And it had about broken Dimity Munroe's heart.
But it served her right.
If she'd had any gumption she'd have caught her another man long ago, instead of waiting for Alex to get money enough to marry her.
Scarlett chattered on cheerfully but there were many things about the County which she suppressed, things that hurt to think about.
She had driven over the County with Will, trying not to remember when these thousands of fertile acres had stood green with cotton.
Now, plantation after plantation was going back to the forest, and dismal fields of broomsedge, scrub oak and runty pines had grown stealthily about silent ruins and over old cotton fields.
Only one acre was being farmed now where once a hundred had been under the plow.
It was like moving through a dead land.
"This section won't come back for fifty years--if it ever comes back," Will had said.
"Tara's the best farm in the County, thanks to you and me, Scarlett, but it's a farm, a two-mule farm, not a plantation.
And the Fontaine place, it comes next to Tara and then the Tarletons.
They ain't makin' much money but they're gettin' along and they got gumption.
But most of the rest of the folks, the rest of the farms--"
No, Scarlett did not like to remember the way the deserted County looked.
It seemed even sadder, in retrospect, beside the bustle and prosperity of Atlanta.
"Has anything happened here?" she asked when they were finally home and were seated on the front porch.
She had talked rapidly and continuously all the way home, fearing that a silence would fall.
She had not had a word alone with Rhett since that day when she fell down the steps and she was none too anxious to be alone with him now.
She did not know how he felt toward her.
He had been kindness itself during her miserable convalescence, but it was the kindness of an impersonal stranger.
He had anticipated her wants, kept the children from bothering her and supervised the store and the mills.
But he had never said:
"I'm sorry."
Well, perhaps he wasn't sorry.
Perhaps he still thought that child that was never born was not his child.
How could she tell what went on in the mind behind the bland dark face?
But he had showed a disposition to be courteous, for the first time in their married life, and a desire to let life go on as though there had never been anything unpleasant between them--as though, thought Scarlett, cheerlessly, as though there had never been anything at all between them.
Well, if that was what he wanted, she could act her part too.
"Is everything all right?" she repeated.
"Did you get the new shingles for the store?
Did you swap the mules?
For Heaven's sake, Rhett, take those feathers out of your hat.