Читать онлайн «Gone with the Wind / Унесённые ветром»

Margaret Mitchell

Gone with the Wind

Part one

Chapter I

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?”

“Not going to be any war!” cried the twins indignantly.

Scarlett made a mouth of bored impatience.