All opinions of characters in this story are their own, and they don’t necessarily need to correspond with the opinions of the author.

Mr Bennet hasn’t considered himself to be too much a religious person, but he was now contemplating how Mr Collins’ only contribution to the Christian religion in England is testing any good subject of His Majesty King (in whatever mental state he happened to be at the moment) regarding their humility and patience. If it was anybody else he would have no problem to send him speedily out of his door, but Mr Bennet knew that when he dies his wife and his then still unwed daughters may be subject to the whimsies of Mr Collins, and so he kept himself not to offend him too much. However, he let this test of Christian charity talk too long, and he had to interrupt him right now.

“Mr Collins, I read my Seneca and Marcus Aurelius when in Oxford, and so I know that simple speech is always better than an overly ornate one. Let me therefore speak plainly.

You came to the conclusion, either on your own or under the influence of your patroness, that you should marry soon so that you would be a good example to your parishioners. Then you decided to join this task with a Christian effort to bridge the gap between yourself and our family, and to ask one of my daughters to marry you. And now you are here asking me for permission to do so.

Is that correct?”

He didn’t say what he was thinking, that for the rector it was also the most simple way to obtain a woman, who would be most likely willing to accept him as a husband, but he didn’t think it was necessary to mention that.

A long speech consisting mainly of words of five syllables or more (most of them incorrectly used) which took few minutes to perform made Mr Bennet understood to be affirmative.

“I understand you want to ask my daughter to marry you, but it is not that simple. I have five daughters, which one of them is it?” Mr Collins gasped for a moment as if he had never considered this problem before and in another long speech he explained that Mrs Bennet told him that the oldest one, the proper Miss Bennet, expects an offer any day now, and thus he thought about asking the second one, Miss Elizabeth.

“Mr Collins, I don’t think it is a good idea. Miss Elizabeth would not be a good wife for you. I like her a lot, some say that I prefer her to my other daughters, which I strongly deny, but even I see how much she doesn’t fit with what I think would be a good wife for you. She is extremely intelligent, but she is unfortunately also quite headstrong, whether it is my after myself or her mother, quite headstrong. If you are looking for a good quiet submissive pastor wife, she is not that. I believe that the marriage which would suit her most would be a partnership of two equals, both of them quite intelligent, and even so, I would expect their relationship to be rather … how to say it nicely … lively.

She is also from my daughters the least religious one. I mean, we are all here good Anglicans, attending church regularly, doing all the prayers, but I believe Elizabeth tried to read Fordyce Sermons once and threw them away after reading the first one. Moreover, and that’s the most important, I couldn’t support you asking her, when there is my third daughter, Mary, who is just the opposite: she is quiet, the only time she is passionate, it is about her religion or somebody doing something she couldn’t approve, reading sermons when other ladies would read novels, and I would think that to be a rector’s wife is her deepest dream. I will tell you what we will do. I don’t give you permission to propose to Elizabeth, but stay here for a month, court properly Mary, and if at the end of the month both of you will like the idea, ask her for her hand. Is that acceptable?”

Mr Collins was silent for a long moment. Apparently, he was not happy that Mr Bennet pushed him even to a younger daughter, he also hoped to return quickly to his patroness, but in the end he accepted, that the father did not mean a personal slight, and that Mr Bennet probably knows his daughters better.

Mr Bennet ignored the long, ornate response and managed to understand that Mr Collins found such an arrangement acceptable.

All wished Mary her luck, and it seemed that the Bennet household achieved an unusual quiet period in the next few days. Unfortunately, the quiet was not meant to last.

Just barely a week later in the evening Elizabeth and Jane were chatting before going to their beds, and suddenly upset and crying Mary rushed to their room.

“I just cannot do it! I don’t know what to do! I am so unhappy!”

With these words, she threw herself on Jane’s bed, and she was crying her eyes out. Both her sisters were immediately on her, holding her and comforting her.

“Mary, what’s going on? What you cannot do? Did Lydia tease you again?”

“Not them, it’s Mr Collins!” and she was crying again.

“What? Mr Collins! What did he do? Did he say something hurtful to you? Did he … tell me, he didn’t hurt you!”

The whole situation was completely bizarre. Mary, who was always the most solid and composed person in the house, was crying, shouting, and completely lost her control.

Elizabeth was not sure what to do, so she just sat down next to Mary on the bed and brought her to her arms. To her surprise, her sister didn’t fight her, but stayed cuddled with her for a longer time. When she was quiet again, Elizabeth asked her again:

“Mary, what happened? …”, she wanted to ask something more, but in the end she really didn’t know what to say, so she just waited for a response.

“I just cannot do it!”

“Do what?”

“Mother, speaks to me every day how I should be nice to Mr Collins, and that a lot depends on me, and how she doesn’t want to end in the hedgerows and everything, and I don’t know what to do!”

“And what happened with Mr Collins? Did you disagree with him on the understanding of predestination and prevenient grace?”

Mary turned towards her and she looked offended.

“Lizzy, do you really think that I would dislike a man just because of such minutia? Nobody understands God fully, and the more we pretend we do, the more we are lying to ourselves.”

Elizabeth felt slightly ashamed.

“I am sorry, Mary, I was not serious, I really don’t understand much of what’s going on in your head. Why did you disagree with him?”

“You are right, I haven’t talked with you about what was going on with me in the last year or so.”

She sat up, cleaned her eyes, blew her nose loudly, waited a moment, and then she started.

“Do you know the Fawleys, they have a shop on the High Street?”

“What they have to do with anything? Yes, I know them, Mama likes their marmalade.”

“Yes, that’s them. Miss Anna Fawley, thinking that I am ‘the religious Bennet’, introduced me to the Methodist meeting in their home.”

“Methodists? That’s a wild turn for you! Where is the proper Mary Bennet with the emotional Methodism?”

“Actually, don’t worry about me, their teaching has no big attraction to me. On the one hand, they were constantly checking whether their heart was warm enough, whether the Holy Spirit testifies to their spirits something, and similar nonsense. I would think that one good part of being a Protestant is that we could rely just on the Grace of God and not to worry about the state of our heart, because we know that it is nothing to be excited about anyway. And they had many more anxieties. I was thinking mostly about you, my sisters, when I was listening to them, and I just couldn’t make it work in my head. Did you know, Lizzy, that any joke or laughing is without a doubt a sin, because we should soberly work towards our redemption? And did you know, Jane, that being pretty and dressing accordingly is quite certainly a grievous sin against the Holy Writ? Did you know that you must always wear a hideous dark garb so as not to tempt a man with your beauty? I was listening to one man explaining this to us, ladies, and I couldn’t stop myself thinking that if I joined these Methodists, the time would come where I would have to choose between loving or judging you, Lizzy and Jane, and I suddenly feared strongly that I would be a coward and decide poorly.

Yes, some of your jokes, Lizzy, are so bad that you should ask forgiveness for them, but fun and laughter is just not wrong.

And, yes, I will always prefer adorn myself with the hidden person of the heart than just with braiding the hair, wearing gold jewellery, or putting on apparel, but it doesn’t mean, that if the Good Lord decided to create pretty women, then in all due modesty we should chastely celebrate it and not be ashamed. It all sounded so excessive, melodramatic, non-English, I couldn’t accept it. They would probably be horribly offended if I said that, but they seemed to me quite popish.

However, Miss Anna lent me a collection of sermons by John Wesley himself, and whatever I think about his followers, he was the real Christian teacher. He really touched my conscience, and he has shown how much of what I hold right was just hypocrisy, feeling superior and judgemental, and how much true Christianity must be about the state of our heart, our relationship with the Lord Jesus, and not about tithes of mint. There is a sermon about it, called ‘ The Almost Christian ’, where he accuses many Christians of being too shallow, just with a form of godliness, but without any true love of God and neighbour, and without genuine trust and confidence in God. He preached it first in St Mary University Church in Oxford, and apparently, he was too successful in persuading some shallow Christians about the state of their heart, because they forbade him to ever preach in Oxford again.

I cried the whole day after reading that sermon, and I was living in a daze for a week until I resolved that honesty and true adherence to Jesus will be my guides in my life, and consequently that I cannot marry somebody who is not honest with himself and with God.”

Jane and Elizabeth were looking at their sister with a bit of awe. It was Lizzy who managed to reply first:

“Mary, it is a pity you have never told us! I am really proud of you! And, now it is obvious, Mr Collins is not exactly the ideal of your husband, right?”

“An ideal? He is just the complete opposite! When I made that resolution, I spent a long time thinking, what do I really expect from any husband I should have. And I wouldn’t be against having as a husband a handsome, rich gentleman with good connections, it would be dishonest to say otherwise, but I know that I am not beautiful enough …”

“Mary!” Jane interrupted her with a face of horror.

“… no, let me finish, I am not saying I am ugly, there is nothing wrong with me, but I know that I am not beautiful like you, Jane, who can launch thousand ships, and pretty enough to attract a rich husband, who would be willing for your beauty to overlook our lack of dowry and lack of connections. And when I was thinking about my marriage prospects, I know I would be lucky if I launch one small dinghy with my husband-to-be, but I have discovered to my surprise that I don’t care that much how rich of well positioned my potential husband would be, I really do wish foremost for him to be an honest man, honest with God and with me. I think this is the most important thing for me. I would happily marry any man, who would be true and I could respect him and who would respect me. I would rather be a tradesman’s wife, helping him to keep his books, then being Mr Collin’s wife. At least that tradesman could be a true man, serving faithfully God where he is. Mr Collins is just one big fake. If he just did one honest thing in his life and made a wooden idol of Lady Catherine and worshipped it, he would do better than pretending to be the Minister to the Lord Jesus Christ!”

Jane shrieked in shock: “Mary! That was not nice to say that about Mr Collins! What happened? Would the Reverend Fordyce approve?”

“I am really no certain what the Reverend Fordyce thinks these days[^1], but make no mistake. I still believe that honour, honesty, and virtue are our greatest treasures, perhaps the only treasures worthy of our safeguarding. And I still beileve, that those books are not evil or foolish, I think that reading his sermons is a good thing to do for a girl learning her etiquette and good behaviour, and we should be careful about our behaviour and our reputation, but real life must be about so much more than that. And his books are much about that surface, how things look, aren’t they?”

Elizabeth laughed: “I wouldn’t know, I was never able to finish reading one sermon completely! I will quite happily let you be our family specialist on the good Reverend, so if you say so, it must be it.”

Jane didn’t lose her common sense to the silliness of the situation: “What you are going to say to Mama?”

“That’s the point, I don’t know! I really feel guilty, I should honour my parents, and well, because, … as much as I don’t like it, Mama has a point: what shall we do when the inevitable happens?”

Jane replied: “No, that’s a wrong question to ask. I hope that Papa will be around long enough, so that we shouldn’t bother personally at all, because we all would marry and not live here. And let us hope one of us will be in the position to take care of our mother.”

Elizabeth continued: “Yes, that’s right, but I think it goes further. You have been always talking about our duty, and I agree that we should not shrink of fulfilling it, but it has its other side as well, you should in my opinion make it clear for yourself whose duty is precisely what. Our duty as good daughters of our age and place is to get well married, have a good family, and take care of our children and husband. Our parents were burdened by the Fate or our grandfather with the additional duty, because of the entail, to have a son. If we can also achieve something more with our marriages, like improving the family station or wealth, or breaking the entail, then it is nice, but not our duty. I think it is important to know whose duty is exactly what. Of course, I use the word ‘duty’ in a quite loose sense, I don’t mean that our parents would do anything bad not having a son, or that we would be evil if any of us wouldn’t get well married.

Besides, Mary, I am not the biggest expert on the Holy Scripture in this family, but I dimly remember something about trusting in the Lord with all our heart and not leaning on our own understanding.[^2] Shouldn’t we do it more than thinking which one of us should throw herself to Mr Collins as a sacrifice to our late grandfather’s whim?”

Mary looked for a moment a bit shocked, and it took her a moment before she was even able to say anything, but then she just breathed out, “Give me a moment to think about this.”

All the girls were sitting in the parlour and thinking about their fate. It was a long time before Mary looked up and spoke firmly.

“You are right, Lizzy. It is really not fair for me to be this family's sacrificial lamb. It was not my fault we had no brothers to break the entail. That was my parents' duty, not mine. I would not allow Mama to burden me with it. Let’s go speak to our father.”

[^1] I really don’t know about his opinions myself, as I have never read those sermons. There are many strange quotations on Wikipedia about his ideas, which don’t make a complete sense to me.

[^2] Proverbs 3:5-6