Living with Charles'blood kin,seeing the home from which he came,Scarlett could now understand a little better the boy who had made her wife,widow and mother in such rapid succession.It was easy to see why he had been so shy,so unsophisticated,so idealistic.If Charles had inherited any of the qualities of the stern,fearless,hot-tempered soldier who had been his father,they had been obliterated in childhood by the ladylike atmosphere in which he had been reared.He had been devoted to the childlike Pitty and closer than brothers usually are to Melanie,and two more sweet,unworldly women could not be found.
Aunt Pittypat had been christened Sarah Jane Hamilton sixty years before,but since the long-past day when her doting father had fastened this nickname upon her,because of her airy,restless,pattering little feet,no one had called her anything else.In the years that followed that second christening,many changes had taken place in her that made the pet name incongruous.Of the swiftly scampering child,all that now remained were two tiny feet,inadequate to her weight,and a tendency to prattle happily and aimlessly.She was stout,pink-cheeked and silver haired and always a little breathless from too tightly laced stays.She was unable to walk more than a block on the tiny feet which she crammed into too small slippers.She had a heart which fluttered at an excitement and she pampered it shamelessly,fainting at any provocation.Everyone knew that her swoons were generally mere ladylike pretenses but they loved her enough to refrain from saying so.Everyone loved her,spoiled her like a child and refused to take her seriously—everyone except her brother Henry.
She liked gossip better than anything else in the world,even more than she liked the pleasures of the table,and she prattled on for hours about other people's affairs in a harmless kindly way.She had no memory for names,dates or places and frequently confused the actors in one Atlanta drama with the actors in another,which misled no one for no one was foolish enough to take seriously anything she said.No one ever told her anything really shocking or scandalous,for her spinster state must be protected even if she was sixty years old,and her friends were in a kindly conspiracy to keep her a sheltered and petted old child.
Melanie was like her aunt in many ways.She had her shyness,her sudden blushes,her modesty,but she did have common sense—“Of a sort,I'll admit that,”Scarlett thought grudgingly.Like Aunt Pitty,Melanie had the face of a sheltered child who had never known anything but simplicity and kindness,truth and love,a child who had never looked upon harshness or evil and would not recognize them if she saw them.Because she had always been happy,she wanted everyone about her to be happy or,at least,pleased with themselves.To this end,she always saw the best in everyone and remarked kindly upon it.There was no servant so stupid that she did not find some redeeming trait of loyalty and kind-heartedness,no girl so ugly and disagreeable that she could not discover grace of form or nobility of character in her,and no man so worthless or so boring that she did not view him in the light of his possibilities rather than his actualities.
Because of these qualities that came sincerely and spontaneously from a generous heart,everyone flocked about her,for who can resist the charm of one who discovers in others admirable qualities undreamed of even by himself?She had more girl friends than anyone in town and more men friends too,though she had few beaux for she lacked the willfulness and selfishness that go far toward trapping men's hearts.
What Melanie did was no more than all Southern girls were taught to do—to make those about them feel at ease and pleased with themselves.It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant.Women knew that a land where men were contented,uncontradicted and safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live.So,from the cradle to the grave,women strove to make men pleased with themselves,and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration.In fact,men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence.Scarlett exercised the same charms as Melanie but with a studied artistry and consummate skill.The difference between the two girls lay in the fact that Melanie spoke kind and flattering words from a desire to make people happy,if only temporarily,and Scarlett never did it except to further her own aims.
From the two he loved best,Charles had received no toughening influences,learned nothing of harshness or reality,and the home in which he grew to manhood was as soft as a bird's nest.It was such a quiet,old-fashioned,gentle home compared with Tara.To Scarlett,this house cried out for the masculine smells of brandy,tobacco and Macassar oil,for hoarse voices and occasional curses,for guns,for whiskers,for saddles and bridles and for hounds underfoot.She missed the sounds of quarreling voices that were always heard at Tara when Ellen's back was turned,Mammy quarreling with Pork,Rosa and Teena bickering,her own acrimonious arguments with Suellen,Gerald's bawling threats.No wonder Charles had been a sissy,coming from a home like this.Here,excitement never entered in,voices were never raised,everyone deferred gently to the opinions of others,and,in the end,the black grizzled autocrat in the kitchen had his way.Scarlett,who had hoped for a freer rein when she escaped Mammy's supervision,discovered to her sorrow that Uncle Peter's standards of ladylike conduct,especially for Mist'Charles'widow,were even stricter than Mammy's.
