renounced his work, or added to the apologetic messages he had sent by Fulkerson.  So far as March knew, Dryfoos had been left to suppose that Lindau had simply stopped for some reason that did not personally affect him.  They never spoke of him, and March was too proud to ask either Fulkerson or Conrad whether the old man knew that Lindau had returned his money.  He avoided talking to Conrad, from a feeling that if he did he should involuntarily lead him on to speak of his differences with his father.  Between himself and Fulkerson, even, he was uneasily aware of a want of their old perfect friendliness.  Fulkerson had finally behaved with honor and courage; but his provisional reluctance had given March the measure of Fulkerson’s character in one direction, and he could not ignore the fact that it was smaller than he could have wished.

He could not make out whether Fulkerson shared his discomfort or not.  It certainly wore away, even with March, as time passed, and with Fulkerson, in the bliss of his fortunate love, it was probably far more transient, if it existed at all.  He advanced into the winter as radiantly as if to meet the spring, and he said that if there were any pleasanter month of the year than November, it was December, especially when the weather was good and wet and muddy most of the time, so that you had to keep indoors a long while after you called anywhere.

Colonel Woodburn had the anxiety, in view of his daughter’s engagement, when she asked his consent to it, that such a dreamer must have in regard to any reality that threatens to affect the course of his reveries.  He had not perhaps taken her marriage into account, except as a remote contingency; and certainly Fulkerson was not the kind of son-in-law that he had imagined in dealing with that abstraction.  But because he had nothing of the sort definitely in mind, he could not oppose the selection of Fulkerson with success; he really knew nothing against him, and he knew, many things in his favor; Fulkerson inspired him with the liking that every one felt for him in a measure; he amused him, he cheered him; and the colonel had been so much used to leaving action of all kinds to his daughter that when he came to close quarters with the question of a son-in-law he felt helpless to decide it, and he let her decide it, as if it were still to be decided when it was submitted to him.  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.