Susannah perceived that there was something behind this. "You're not vexed, are you?"
Emma continued with more hesitation in her tones. "No, I'm not vexed. Why should I be? And besides I like you and Mr. Halsey better than any of the folks, although I couldn't let it be known."
"There's something that you are thinking about."
Emma sighed deeply; her mien faltered; she subsided again into her seat by the wall and into tears. "It's only that I feel that Joseph's getting to be such a great man. Why, there's more than a thousand folks now looking to him all the time to be told what to do, and thousands more drawing in, and Joseph beginning to wear the kid gloves whenever he goes on the street."
There was an interval of sighs and suppressed sobs.
"Aren't you glad? I thought you were glad about it."
"I declare papa and mamma were just wild when I ran away and married Joseph, because they said that he was a low fellow, and poor, and not good enough for me, and now—and now—I begin to feel that I'm not good enough for him."
Susannah went over and sat beside her, chiding indignantly. "You know very well that nobody could be the same help to him that you are, and you know very well that there's nobody in the world that he thinks so much of as you." She did not say all she thought. She considered Emma to be Smith's superior, but that opinion would have given acute pain.
The young church worked upon Smith's principles of thrift, temperance, and co-operation, and Kirtland rapidly assumed the proportions of a town. Susannah became the mistress of the children's school. Smith was a good economist; although he helped the needy, nothing that his converts could pay for was given to them for nothing. Hence it was that Susannah's private purse was well filled with tuition fees.
She had already in mind what she would do with this money; she would write to the booksellers in Boston who fulfilled Ephraim's orders, and obtain from them some of the books whose names she remembered to have seen on his shelves. She knew nothing of their contents, she hardly knew whether she wanted them more for the sake of their contents or for their familiar appearance, but she thought that if she did not understand them when reading, she could write to Ephraim and ask for an explanation. She could not think of any other excuse for writing to him again. It had taken her a good many months to think of this one.