She was
competent to treat it in all its phases: not merely those of personal
interest, but those of duty to the broken Southern past, 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.
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