“It depends upon how it’s used.  Do you mean in neckties?” Beaton stole a glance at the one Fulkerson was wearing.

Miss Woodburn laughed with her face bowed upon her wrist.  “Ah do think you gentlemen in the No’th awe ten tahms as lahvely as the ladies.”

“Strange,” said Beaton.  “In the South—­Soath, excuse me!  I made the observation that the ladies were ten times as lively as the gentlemen.  What is that you’re working?”

“This?” Miss Woodburn gave it another flirt, and looked at it with a glance of dawning recognition.  “Oh, this is a table-covah.  Wouldn’t you lahke to see where it’s to go?”

“Why, certainly.”

“Well, if you’ll be raght good I’ll let yo’ give me some professional advass about putting something in the co’ners or not, when you have seen it on the table.”

She rose and led the way into the other room.  Beaton knew she wanted to talk with him about something else; but he waited patiently to let her play her comedy out.  She spread the cover on the table, and he advised her, as he saw she wished, against putting anything in the corners; just run a line of her stitch around the edge, he said.

“Mr. Fulkerson and Ah, why, we’ve been having a regular faght aboat it,” she commented.  “But we both agreed, fahnally, to leave it to you; Mr. Fulkerson said you’d be sure to be raght.  Ah’m so glad you took mah sahde.  But he’s a great admahrer of yours, Mr. Beaton,” she concluded, demurely, suggestively.

“Is he?  Well, I’m a great admirer of Fulkerson,” said Beaton, with a capricious willingness to humor her wish to talk about Fulkerson.  “He’s a capital fellow; generous, magnanimous, with quite an ideal of friendship and an eye single to the main chance all the time.  He would advertise ‘Every Other Week’ on his family vault.”

Miss Woodburn laughed, and said she should tell him what Beaton had said.

“Do.  But he’s used to defamation from me, and he’ll think you’re joking.”

“Ah suppose,” said Miss Woodburn, “that he’s quahte the tahpe of a New York business man.”  She added, as if it followed logically, “He’s so different from what I thought a New York business man would be.”

“It’s your Virginia tradition to despise business,” said Beaton, rudely.

Miss Woodburn laughed again.  “Despahse it?  Mah goodness! we want to get into it and woak it fo’ all it’s wo’th,’ as Mr. Fulkerson says.  That tradition is all past.  You don’t know what the Soath is now.  Ah suppose mah fathaw despahses business, but he’s a tradition himself, as Ah tell him.”  Beaton would have enjoyed joining the young lady in anything she might be going to say in derogation of her father, but he restrained himself, and she went on more and more as if she wished to account for her father’s habitual hauteur with Beaton, if not to excuse it.  “Ah tell him he don’t understand the rising generation.  He was brought up in the old school,