There was one from each of their children, and there was one from Fulkerson, which March opened and read on the street, so as to intercept any unpleasant news there might be in them; there were two letters for Mrs.March which he knew without opening were from Miss Triscoe and Mrs.Adding respectively; Mrs.
Adding's, from the postmarks, seemed to have been following them about for some time.
"They're all right at home," he said.

"Do see what those people have been doing." "I believe," she said, taking a knife from the breakfast tray beside her bed to cut the envelopes, "that you've really cared more about them all along than I have." "No, I've only been anxious to be done with them." She got the letters open, and holding one of them up in each hand she read them impartially and simultaneously; then she flung them both down, and turned her face into her pillow with an impulse of her inalienable girlishness.

"Well, it is too silly." March felt authorized to take them up and read them consecutively; when he had done, so he did not differ from his wife.

In one case, Agatha had written to her dear Mrs.March that she and Burnamy had just that evening become engaged; Mrs.Adding, on her part owned a farther step, and announced her marriage to Mr.Kenby.Following immemorial usage in such matters Kenby had added a postscript affirming his happiness in unsparing terms, and in Agatha's letter there was an avowal of like effect from Burnamy.

Agatha hinted her belief that her father would soon come to regard Burnamy as she did; and Mrs.Adding professed a certain humiliation in having realized that, after all her misgiving about him, Rose seemed rather relieved than otherwise, as if he were glad to have her off his hands.
"Well," said March, "with these troublesome affairs settled, I don't see what there is to keep us in Europe any longer, unless it's the consensus of opinion in Tom, Bella, and Fulkerson, that we ought to stay the winter." "Stay the winter!" Mrs.March rose from her pillow, and clutched the home letters to her from the abeyance in which they had fallen on the coverlet while she was dealing with the others.