“Starving is good enough for us. It ought to be good enough for you,” was the way the Old Guard felt. Many ex-Confederate soldiers, knowing the frantic fear of men who saw their families in want, were more tolerant of former comrades who had changed political colors in order that their families might eat. But not the women of the Old Guard, and the women were the implacable and inflexible power behind the social throne. The Lost Cause was stronger, dearer now in their hearts than it had ever been at the height of its glory. It was a fetish now. Everything about it was sacred, the graves of the men who had died for it, the battle fields, the torn flags, the crossed sabres in their halls, the fading letters from the front, the veterans. These women gave no aid, comfort or quarter to the late enemy, and now Scarlett was numbered among the enemy.
In this mongrel society thrown together by the exigencies of the political situation, there was but one thing in common. That was money. As most of them had never had twenty-five dollars at one time in their whole lives, previous to the war, they were now embarked on an orgy of spending such as Atlanta had never seen before.
With the Republicans in the political saddle the town entered into an era of waste and ostentations, with the trappings of refinement thinly veneering the vice and vulgarity beneath. Never before had the cleavage of the very rich and the very poor been so marked. Those on top took no thought for those less fortunate. Except for the negroes, of course. They must have the very best. The best of schools and lodgings and clothes and amusements, for they were the power in politics and every negro vote counted. But as for the recently impoverished Atlanta people, they could starve and drop in the streets for all the newly rich Republicans cared.
On the crest of this wave of vulgarity, Scarlett rode triumphantly, newly a bride, dashingly pretty in her fine clothes, with Rhett’s money solidly behind her. It was an era that suited her, crude, garish, showy, full of over-dressed women, over furnished houses, too many jewels, too many horses, too much food, too much whisky. When Scarlett infrequently stopped to think about the matter she knew that none of her new associates could be called ladies by Ellen’s strict standards. But she had broken with Ellen’s standards too many times since that far-away day when she stood in the parlor at Tara and decided to be Rhett’s mistress, and she did not often feel the bite of conscience now.
Perhaps these new friends were not, strictly speaking, ladies and gentlemen but like Rhett’s New Orleans friends, they were so much fun! So very much more fun than the subdued, churchgoing, Shakespeare-reading friends of her earlier Atlanta days. And, except for her brief honeymoon interlude, she had not had fun in so long. Nor had she had any sense of security. Now secure, she wanted to dance, to play, to riot, to gorge on foods and fine wine, to deck herself in silks and satins, to wallow on soft feather beds and fine upholstery. And she did all these things. Encouraged by Rhett’s amused tolerance, freed now from the restraints of her childhood, freed even from that last fear of poverty, she was permitting herself the luxury she had often dreamed – of doing exactly what she pleased and telling people who didn’t like it to go to hell.
To her had come that pleasant intoxication peculiar to those whose lives are a deliberate slap in the face of organized society – the gambler, the confidence man, the polite adventuress, all those who succeed by their wits. She said and did exactly what she pleased and, in practically no time, her insolence knew no bounds.
She did not hesitate to display arrogance to her new Republican and Scallawag friends but to no other class was she ruder or more insolent than the Yankee officers of the garrison and their families. Of all the heterogeneous mass of people who had poured into Atlanta, the army people alone she refused to receive or tolerate. She even went out of her way to be bad mannered to them. Melanie was not alone in being unable to forget what a blue uniform meant. To Scarlett, that uniform and those gold buttons would always mean the fears of the siege, the terror of flight, the looting and burning, the desperate poverty and the grinding work at Tara. Now that she was rich and secure in the friendship of the governor and many prominent Republicans, she could be insulting to every blue uniform she saw. And she was insulting.
Rhett once lazily pointed out to her that most of the male guests who assembled under their roof had worn that same blue uniform not so long ago, but she retorted that a Yankee didn’t seem like a Yankee unless he had on a blue uniform. To which Rhett replied: “Consistency, thou art a jewel,” and shrugged.