st, sentimentally
dear to him, and practically absurd to her. No such South as he
remembered had ever existed to her knowledge, and no such civilization as
he imagined would ever exist, to her belief, anywhere. She took the world
as she found it, and made the best of it. She trusted in Fulkerson; she
had proved his magnanimity in a serious emergency; and in small things
she was willing fearlessly to chance it with him. She was not a
sentimentalist, and there was nothing fantastic in her expectations; she
was a girl of good sense and right mind, and she liked the immediate
practicality as well as the final honor of Fulkerson. She did not
idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him; she did him
justice, and she would not have believed that she did him more than
justice if she had sometimes known him to do himself less.

Their engagement was a fact to which the Leighton household adjusted
itself almost as simply as the lovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the
ladies at once, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson could keep from
March very long. He sent word of it to Mrs. March by her husband; and his
engagement perhaps did more than anything else to confirm the confidence
in him which had been shaken by his early behavior in the Lindau episode,
and not wholly restored by his tardy fidelity to March. But now she felt
that a man who wished to get married so obviously and entirely for love
was full of all kinds of the best instincts, and only needed the guidance
of a wife, to become very noble. She interested herself intensely in
balancing the respective merits of the engaged couple, and after her call
upon Miss Woodburn in her new character she prided herself upon
recognizing the worth of some strictly Southern qualities in her, while
maintaining the general average of New England superiority. She could not
reconcile herself to the Virginian custom illustrated in her having been
christened with the surname of Madison; and she said that its pet form of
Mad, which Fulkerson promptly invented, only made it more ridiculous.

Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton. He was afraid, somehow, of
Beaton's taking the matter in the cynical way; Miss Woodburn said she
would break off the engagement if Beaton was left to guess it or find it
out by accident, and then Fulkerson plucked up his courage. Beaton
received the news with gravity, and with a sort of melancholy meekness
that strongly moved Fulkerson's sympathy, and mad