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Gone with the Wind / Унесённые ветром
Gone with the Wind
© Шитова Л. Ф., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2020
© ООО «ИД «Антология», 2020
Part one
Chapter I
Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men admired her charm. In her face were the delicate features of her mother of French descent, and the heavy ones of her Irish father. But it was an attractive face, with a pointed chin. Her eyes were pale green with black lashes. Above them, her thick black brows went upward. She had magnolia-white skin – so prized by Southern women of Georgia[1].
Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara, her father’s plantation, that bright April afternoon of 1861, she made a pretty picture. Her new green dress matched the flat-heeled green slippers her father had recently brought her from Atlanta[2]. The dress showed the seventeen-inch waist, and the basque showed breasts well matured for her sixteen years.
On either side of her, the twin brothers sat in their chairs, laughing and talking. Nineteen years old, six feet two inches tall, they were as much alike as two bolls of cotton.
Their faces were typical of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books. Raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, and drinking like a gentleman were the things that mattered.
Their family had more money, more horses, more slaves than anyone else in the County, but the boys had less grammar than most of their neighbors.
They had just been expelled from the University of Georgia, the fourth university that had thrown them out in two years; and their older brothers, Tom and Boyd, had come home with them, because they refused to remain at an institution where the twins were not welcome. As for Scarlett, she had not opened a book since leaving the Fayetteville Female Academy the year before.
“I know you two don’t care about being expelled, or Tom either,” she said. “But what about Boyd? He wants to get an education. He’ll never get finished at this rate.”
“It don’t matter much,” answered Brent carelessly. “We had to come home before the term was out anyway.”
“Why?”
“The war, goose! The war’s going to start any day, and you don’t suppose any of us would stay in college with a war going on, do you?”