Sentada con Stuart y Brent Tarleton a la fresca sombra del porche de Tara, la plantación de su padre, aquella mañana de abril de 1861, la joven ofrecía una imagen linda y atrayente. Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother's gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy her eyes were her own. The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor.
But for all the modesty of her spreading skirts, the demureness of hair netted smoothly into a chignon and the quietness of small white hands folded in her lap, her true self was poorly concealed. The dress set off to perfection the seventeen-inch waist, the smallest in three counties, and the tightly fitting basque showed breasts well matured for her sixteen years.
Her new green flowered-muslin dress spread its twelve yards of billowing material over her hoops and exactly matched the flat-heeled green morocco slippers her father had recently brought her from Atlanta. Seated with Stuart and Brent Tarleton in the cool shade of the porch of Tara, her father's plantation, that bright April afternoon of 1861, she made a pretty picture. Sobre ellos, unas negras y espesas cejas, sesgadas hacia arriba, cortaban con tímida y oblicua línea el blanco magnolia de su cutis, ese cutis tan apreciado por las meridionales y que tan celosamente resguardan del cálido sol de Georgia con sombreros, velos y mitones. Sus ojos eran de un verde pálido, sin mezcla de castaño, sombreados por negras y rígidas pestañas, levemente curvadas en las puntas. Pero era el suyo, con todo, un semblante atractivo, de barbilla puntiaguda y de anchos pómulos. En su rostro contrastaban acusadamente las delicadas facciones de su madre, una aristócrata de la costa, de familia francesa, con las toscas de su padre, un rozagante irlandés. Scarlett O'Hara no era bella, pero los hombres no solían darse cuenta de ello hasta que se sentían ya cautivos de su embrujo, como les sucedía a los gemelos Tarleton. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin-that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
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