"Very well; indeed, I don't think I can keep it to myself, it is too much joy."
"Do you expect them to participate in your pleasure at making your escape from them?"
"There is no one to miss me, except, perhaps, Lionel, a little, when his eyes are bad. Caroline would once have cared, but that is over now, poor thing! There never was a time when I should have been more glad to get away. O, Edmund, if you would do one thing to oblige me, it would be, to have your wedding the same day as Caroline's, that I might not be obliged to be at it."
"At which?"
"O, you know!"
"Is it such a very bad affair?"
"O, I am very much grieved about it. The man has no religion at all, you know; at least, if he has any, it is all natural religion,—anything but the truth."
"Do you really mean that the family have accepted him, allowed this to go on, knowing such things of him?"
"I don't know how far they see it. I don't think they allow it to themselves, and I don't think they would understand some of it; as, for instance, when I heard him talking the other day as if he assumed that Christianity was only a development of people's tendency to believe,—as fleeting as other forms of faith. It was not very broadly stated, and I don't think I should have seen it, if it had not chimed in with something I had read; and, besides, I knew what was in the man."
"How do you know? Not from your own observation?"