“What about your father?”
“Oh, he’ll jump at it, of course. It’s been the one wish of his heart, all along,” said Adrian easily.
Quentillian wondered how it was possible that any youth, brought up in the intellectual atmosphere of St. Gwenllian, could be so entirely devoid of insight. To his own way of thinking, it was utterly incredible that Canon Morchard, ardent Christian and idealist, should contemplate with any degree of equanimity, his son’s proposed flippant adoption of a vocation which he regarded as sacred.
Owen committed himself to no promises.
“I should like to talk it over with Val.”
“I suppose if you must you must,” said Adrian, grudgingly. “But don’t let her tell anyone else.”
Valeria’s views were not far removed from Quentillian’s own.
It sometimes, indeed, seemed to Owen that the identity of their points of view on every other subject only rendered more evident the deep gulf dividing them on the topic that Valeria had decreed should be a barred one—that of religion.
Spoken, their very difference might have brought them closer together. Unspoken, it seemed to Owen to pervade all their intercourse since their engagement as it had never done before.