She was relieved at once. “If that’s all—I don’t approve of it myself. You wouldn’t have to.”
“Oh, that’s what you say now”—he spoke with an air of shrewdness and suspicion,—“but when I got in you’d throw up my duty to me constant about building up the Kingdom. Oh, I know how it’s done! I’ve heard your preachers talk enough.”
“But it isn’t necessary. I wouldn’t—I don’t think it would be at all nice of you.”
He looked at her with warm sympathy. “You poor ignorant girl! Not to know your own religion! I read in that book there about this marrying business only the other day. Just hand me that one.”
She handed him the “Book of Doctrine and Covenants,” from which she had occasionally taught him the Lord’s word as revealed to Joseph Smith. The revelation on celestial marriage had never been among her selections. He turned to it now.
“Here, right in the very first of it—” and she heard with a sinking heart,—“‘Therefore prepare thyself to receive and obey the instructions which I am about to give unto you; for all those who have this law revealed unto them must obey the same; for behold! I reveal unto you a new and everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant then are ye damned, for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.’
“There now!”
“I never read it,” she faltered.
“And don’t you know they preach in the tabernacle that anybody who rejects polygamy will be damned?”
“My father never preached that.”