He reached for her small brown hand that still held the Book of Mormon open on her lap, and took it in both his own. He went on, appealingly:
“Now you try to tell me right—like as if I was your own brother—tell me as a sister. Try to put yourself in the place of the girl I’d marry first—no, don’t; it seems more like your sister if I hold it this way—and try to think how she’d feel when I brought home my second. Would that be doing square by her? Wouldn’t it sort of get her on the bark? But if I join your Church and don’t do that, I might as well be one of those low-down Freewill Baptists or Episcopals. Come now, tell me true, letting on that you’re my sister.”
She had not looked at him since he began, nor did she now.
“Oh, I don’t know—I don’t know—it’s all so mixed! I thought you could be saved without that.”
“There’s the word of God against me.”
“I wouldn’t want you to marry that way,—if I were your sister.”
“That’s right now, try to feel like a sister. You wouldn’t want me to have as many wives as those old codgers down there below, would you?”
“No—I’m sure you shouldn’t have but one. Oh, you couldn’t marry more than one, could you?” She turned her eyes for the first time upon him, and he saw that some inward warmth seemed to be melting them.
“Well, I’d hate to disappoint you if you were my sister, but there’s the word of the Lord—”
“Oh, but could you anyway, even if you didn’t have a sister, and there was no one but her to think of?”