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 made him wish that Beaton
was engaged, too.

It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left him behind and forgotten;
in a manner, it made him feel trifled with. Something of the
unfriendliness of fate seemed to overcast his resentment, and he allowed
the sadness of his conviction that he had not the means to marry on to
tinge his recognition of the fact that Alma Leighton would not have
wanted him to marry her if he had. He was now often in that martyr mood