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Fancy Dress Masquerade
Seventy girls and boys were the guests of Miss Margaret Mitchell at a fancy dress masquerade yesterday afternoon at the home of her parents Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Mitchell on Peachtree street and the occasion was beautiful and enjoyable.
There was a prize for guessing the greatest number of identities under the masks, and another for the guest who best concealed his or her identity.
The pretty young hostess was a demure Martha Washington in flowered crepe gown over a pink silk petticoat and her powdered hair was worn high.
Mrs. Mitchell wore a ruby velvet gown.
The Constitution, Atlanta, November 21, 1914.
While the Great War carried on in Europe (1914–1918), Margaret Mitchell attended Atlanta's Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), a "fashionable" private girls' school with an enrollment of over 300 students.[49][8]:49 She was very active in the Drama Club.[50] Mitchell played the male characters: Nick Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Launcelot Gobbo in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, among others. She wrote a play about snobbish college girls that she acted in as well.[36]:138 She also joined the Literary Club and had two stories published in the yearbook: Little Sister and Sergeant Terry.[36]:163 & 207 Ten-year-old "Peggy" is the heroine in Little Sister. She hears her older sister being raped and shoots the rapist:[51]
Coldly, dispassionately she viewed him, the chill steel of the gun giving her confidence. She must not miss now—she would not miss—and she did not.[36]:204
Mitchell received encouragement from her English teacher, Mrs. Paisley, who recognized her writing talent.[52] A demanding teacher, Paisley told her she had ability if she worked hard and would not be careless in constructing sentences. A sentence, she said, must be "complete, concise and coherent".[17]:84
Mitchell read the books of Thomas Dixon, Jr., and in 1916, when the silent film, The Birth of a Nation, was showing in Atlanta, she dramatized Dixon's The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907).[53][54][55][56] As both playwright and actress, she took the role of Steve Hoyle.[47]:14–15 For the production, she made a Ku Klux Klan costume from a white crepe dress and wore a boy's wig.[36]:131–132 (Note: Dixon rewrote The Traitor as The Black Hood (1924) and Steve Hoyle was renamed George Wilkes.)[57][58]
During her years at Washington Seminary, Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was away studying at Harvard College (1915–1917), and he left in May 1917 to enlist in the army, about a month after the U.S. declared war on Germany. He set sail for France in April 1918, participated in engagements in the Lagny and Marbache sectors, then returned to Georgia in October as a training instructor.[59] While Margaret and her mother were in New York in September 1918 preparing for Margaret to attend college, Stephens wired his father that he was safe after his ship had been torpedoed en route to New York from France.[60]
Stephens Mitchell thought college was the "ruination of girls".[17]:106 However, May Belle Mitchell placed a high value on education for women and she wanted her daughter's future accomplishments to come from using her mind. She saw education as Margaret's weapon and "the key to survival".[8][38] The classical college education she desired for her daughter was one that was on par with men's colleges, and this type of education was available only at northern schools. Her mother chose Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for Margaret because she considered it to be the best women's college in the United States.[8]:13–14
Upon graduating from Washington Seminary in June 1918, Mitchell fell in love with a Harvard graduate, a young army lieutenant, Clifford West Henry,[61] who was chief bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon from May 10 until the time he set sail for France on July 17.[62] Henry was "slightly effeminate", "ineffectual", and "rather effete-looking" with "homosexual tendencies", according to biographer Anne Edwards. Before departing for France, he gave Mitchell an engagement ring.[63]
On September 14, while she was enrolled at Smith College, Henry was mortally wounded in action in France and died on October 17.[62] As Henry waited in the Verdun trenches, shortly before being wounded, he composed a poem on a leaf torn from his field notebook, found later among his effects. The last stanza of Lieutenant Clifford W. Henry's poem follows:
If "out of luck" at duty's call
In glorious action I should fall
At God's behest,
May those I hold most dear and best
Know I have stood the acid test
Should I "go West."[64]
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