1 The torturing stays no longer pinched her waist and she could breathe deeply and quietly to the bottom of her lungs and her abdomen.
2 With one of the few adult emotions Scarlett had ever had, she realized that to unburden her own tortured heart would be the purest selfishness.
3 There was fighting at Jonesboro--that much Atlanta knew, but how the battle went no one could tell and the most insane rumors tortured the town.
4 She had listened with calm contempt while these women had underrated the Confederate Army, blackguarded Jeff Davis and accused Southerners of murder and torture of their slaves.
5 "Darling, I don't want any explanation from you and I won't listen to one," said Melanie firmly as she gently laid a small hand across Scarlett's tortured lips and stilled her words.
6 For a swift instant there went through her memory again the horrors of her last night in Atlanta, the ruined homes that dotted the countryside, all the stories of rape and torture and murder.
7 There was always something to eat in the army, even if it was just corn bread, always somebody to give orders and none of this torturing sense of facing problems that couldn't be solved--nothing to bother about in the army except getting killed.
8 It was a torture to have her mills in the hands of two men with no more business sense than Hugh and Ashley, heartbreaking to see her competitors taking her best customers away when she had worked so hard and planned so carefully for these helpless months.
9 Fanny Elsing, pale and hollow eyed since Gettysburg, was trying to keep her mind from the torturing picture which had worn a groove in her tired mind these past several months--Lieutenant Dallas McLure dying in a jolting ox cart in the rain on the long, terrible retreat into Maryland.