"The mean things!" cried Scarlett but she had to smile.
He looked like the old Ashley she knew at Twelve Oaks when he smiled like this. And he smiled so seldom these days. The air was so soft, the sun so gentle, Ashley's face so gay, his talk so unconstrained that her heart leaped with happiness. It swelled in her bosom until it positively ached with pleasure, ached as with a burden of joyful, hot, unshed tears. Suddenly she felt sixteen again and happy, a little breathless and excited. She had a mad impulse to snatch off her bonnet and toss it into the air and cry "Hurray!" Then she thought how startled Ashley would be if she did this, and she suddenly laughed, laughed until tears came to her eyes. He laughed, too, throwing back his head as though he enjoyed laughter, thinking her mirth came from the friendly treachery of the men who had given Melly's secret away.
"Come in, Scarlett. I'm going over the books."
She passed into the small room, blazing with the afternoon sun, and sat down in the chair before the roll-topped desk. Ashley, following her, seated himself on the corner of the rough table, his long legs dangling easily.
"Oh, don't let's fool with any books this afternoon, Ashley! I just can't be bothered. When I'm wearing a new bonnet, it seems like all the figures I know leave my head."
"Figures are well lost when the bonnet's as pretty as that one," he said. "Scarlett, you get prettier all the time!"
He slipped from the table and, laughing, took her hands, spreading them wide so he could see her dress. "You are so pretty! I don't believe you'll ever get old!"
At his touch she realized that, without being conscious of it, she had hoped that just this thing would happen. All this happy afternoon, she had hoped for the warmth of his hands, the tenderness of his eyes, a word that would show he cared. This was the first time they had been utterly alone since the cold day in the orchard at Tara, the first time their hands had met in any but formal gestures, and through the long months she had hungered for closer contact. But now --
How odd that the touch of his hands did not excite her! Once his very nearness would have set her a-tremble. Now she fe
lt a curious warm friendliness and content. No fever leaped from his hands to hers and in his hands her heart hushed to happy quietness. This puzzled her, made her a little disconcerted. He was still her Ashley, still her bright, shining darling and she loved him better than life. Then why --
But she pushed the thought from her mind. It was enough that she was with him and he was holding her hands and smiling, completely friendly, without strain or fever. It seemed miraculous that this could be when she thought of all the unsaid things that lay between them. His eyes looked into hers, clear and shining, smiling in the old way she loved, smiling as though there had never been anything between them but happiness. There was no barrier between his eyes and hers now, no baffling remoteness. She laughed.
"Oh, Ashley, I'm getting old and decrepit."
"Ah, that's very apparent! No, Scarlett, when you are sixty, you'll look the same to me. I'll always remember you as you were that day of our last barbecue, sitting under an oak with a dozen boys around you. I can even tell you just how you were dressed, in a white dress covered with tiny green flowers and a white lace shawl about your shoulders. You had on little green slippers with black lacings and an enormous leghorn hat with long green streamers. I know that dress by heart because when I was in prison and things got too bad, I'd take out my memories and thumb them over like pictures, recalling every little detail --"
He stopped abruptly and the eager light faded from his face. He dropped her hands gently and she sat waiting, waiting for his next words.
"We've come a long way, both of us, since that day, haven't we, Scarlett? We've traveled roads we never expected to travel. You've come swiftly, directly, and I, slowly and reluctantly."
He sat down on the table again and looked at her and a small smile crept back into his face. But it was not the smile that had made her so happy so short a while before. It was a bleak smile.
"Yes, you came swiftly, dragging me at your chariot wheels. Scarlett, sometimes I have an impersonal curiosity as to what would have happened to me without you."
Scarlett went quickly to defend him from himself, more quickly because treacherously there rose to her mind Rhett's words on this same subject,
"But I've never done anything for you, Ashley. Without me, you'd have been just the same. Some day, you'd have been a rich man, a great man like you are going to be."
"No, Scarlett, the seeds of greatness were never in me. I think that if it hadn't been for you, I'd have gone down into oblivion -- like poor Cathleen Calvert and so many other people who once had great names, old names."
"Oh, Ashley, don't talk like that. You sound so sad."
"No, I'm not sad. Not any longer. Once -- once I was sad. Now, I'm only --"
He stopped and suddenly she knew what he was thinking. It was the first time she had ever known what Ashley was thinking when his eyes went past her, crystal clear, absent When the fury of love had beaten in her heart, his mind had been closed to her. Now, in the quiet friendliness that lay between them, she could walk a little way into his mind, understand a little. He was not sad any longer. He had been sad after the surrender, sad when she begged him to come to Atlanta. Now, he was only resigned.
"I hate to hear you talk like that, Ashley," she said vehemently. "You sound just like Rhett. He's always harping on things like that and something he calls the survival of the fitting till I'm so bored I could scream."
Ashley smiled.
"Did you ever stop to think, Scarlett, that Rhett and I are fundamentally alike?"
"Oh, no! You are so fine, so honorable and he --" She broke off, confused.
"But we are. We came of the same kind of people, we were raised in the same pattern, brought up to think the same things. And somewhere along the road we took different turnings. We still think alike but we react differently. As, for instance, neither of us believed in the war but I enlisted and fought and he stayed out till nearly the end. We both knew the war was all wrong. We both knew it was a losing fight, I was willing to fight a losing fight. He wasn't. Sometimes I think he was right and then, again -- "
"Oh, Ashley, when will you stop seeing both sides of questions?" she asked. But she did not speak impatiently as she once would have done. "No one ever gets anywhere seeing both sides."
"That's true but -- Scarlett, just where do you want to get? I've often wondered. You see, I never wanted to get anywhere at all. I've only wanted to be myself."