Gone With the Wind 501-600

The war is finally over. The North has won, and most of the Southerners are really upset about the cause and that the war is over. Scarlett, however, is not too upset. She is just glad that this might mean Ashley is coming home sometime soon. She goes to visit some of her neighbors, but most of their plantations are way different than they were before the war, and this kind of upsets her. Frank Kennedy asks Scarlett for Suellen's hand in marriage since Gerald is too senile to give his consent, and Scarlett says it's okay, but she can't imagine that anyone would actually want to marry Suellen. The family receives a letter from Ashley and learns that he is alive, but he has to walk all the way from Indiana to get home. After weeks, he finally arrives. Melanie asks Ashley for advice about the plantation, because she doesn't know if she can afford to keep it up. She ends up telling him that she's in love with him, and they kiss passionately. He tells her that he loves her too, but he can't just leave Melanie. Scarlett starts to become desperate because if she doesn't get money soon, she'll have to sell Tara, which is the only thing that she loves more than Ashley. She decides to go try to marry Rhett Butler because she has heard that he has a lot of money that he looted during the war. She also decides that she'll even agree to be Rhett's mistress if he'll pay to help keep Tara up. When she gets to Atlanta, she finds it burnt beyond recognition, and Rhett is in jail. She goes to the jail and tries to seduce him into marrying her, but he turns her down. Scarlett decides that she needs to marry Frank Kennedy in order to keep up Tara, and she tells him that Suellen is to marry someone else.