place she had ever seen

SHE DID HAVE FUN, more fun than she had had since the spring before the war. New Orleans was such a strange, glamorous place and Scarlett enjoyed it with the headlong pleasure of a pardoned life prisoner. The Carpetbaggers were looting the town, many honest folk were driven from their homes and did not know where to look for their next meal, and a negro sat in the lieutenant governor’s chair. But the New Orleans Rhett showed her was the gayest place she had ever seen. The people she met seemed to have all the money they wanted and no cares at all. Rhett introduced her to dozens of women, pretty women in bright gowns, women who had soft hands that showed no signs of hard work, women who laughed at everything and never talked of stupid serious things or hard times. And the men she met—how thrilling they were! And how different from Atlanta men—and how they fought to dance with her, and paid her the most extravagant compliments as though she were a young belle. 　These men had the same hard reckless look Rhett wore. Their eyes were always alert, like men who have lived too long with danger to be ever quite careless. They seemed to have no pasts or futures, and they politely discouraged Scarlett when, to make conversation, she asked what or where they were before they came to New Orleans. That, in itself, was strange, for in Atlanta every respectable newcomer hastened to present his credentials, to tell proudly of his home and family, to trace the tortuous mazes of relationship that stretched over the entire South. 　But these men were a taciturn lot, picking their words carefully. Sometimes when Rhett was alone with them and Scarlett in the next room, she heard laughter and caught fragments of conversation that meant nothing to her, scraps of words, puzzling names—Cuba and Nassau in the blockade days, the gold rush and claim jumping, gun running and filibustering, Nicaragua and William Walker and how he died against a wall at Truxillo. Once her sudden entrance abruptly terminated a conversation about what had happened to the members of Quantrill’s band of guerillas, and she caught the names of Frank and Jesse James. 　But they were all well mannered, beautifully tailored, and they evidently admired her, so it mattered little to Scarlett that they chose to live utterly in the present. What really mattered was that they were Rhett’s friends and had large houses and fine carriages, and they took her and Rhett driving, invited them to suppers, gave parties in their honor. And Scarlett liked them very well. Rhett was amused when she told him so. 　“I thought you would,” he said and laughed.