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
in which he wished to help his father; not only to deny himself Chianti,
but to forego a fur-lined overcoat which he intended to get for the
winter, He postponed the moment of actual sacrifice as regarded the
Chianti, and he bought the overcoat in an anguish of self-reproach. He
wore it the first evening after he got it in going to call upon the
Leightons, and it seemed to him a piece of ghastly irony when Alma
complimented his picturesqueness in it and asked him to let her sketch
him.
"Oh, you can sketch me," he said, with so much gloom that it made her
laugh.
"If you think it's so serious, I'd rather not."
"No, no! Go ahead! How do you want me?"
"Oh, fling yourself down on a chair in one of your attitudes of studied
negligence; and twist one corner of your mustache with affected absence
of mind.
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