“And,” says I, lookin’ at Elder Judas Wart, with a arrow in each eye (as it were): “This most wholesome restraint, this strongest of ropes that is stretched firm and solid between safety and old Error, you are tryin’ to break down. But you’ll find you can’t do it. No sir! You may all get onto it,—the whole caboodle of you, Mormons, Oneida Communities, Free Lovers, the hull set on you,—and you’ll find it is a rope you can’t break! You’ll find that the most you can do is to teter and swing on it, and stretch it out a little ways, mebby. You can’t break it! No sir! Uncle Samuel (after I have hunched him up) will hold one end of it firm and strong, and Principle and Public Sentiment the other end of it; and if necessary, if danger is at hand, she that was Samantha Smith will lay holt of it, too; and I’d love to see any shacks, or set of shacks, a gettin’ it out of our hands then.”
Oh, how eloquent I had been. But he wuzn’t convinced. I don’t s’pose anybody would hardly believe that a man could listen to such talk, and not be proselyted and converted. But he wuzn’t. After all my outlay and expenditure of eloquence and wind and everything, he wuzn’t convinced a mite. And after he had got his hat all on to go, he jest stood there in front of me, with his hands in his pockets, and says he, bold as brass, and as impudent as brass ever was:
“I am a goin’, mum, and I don’t never expect to see you agin. I never shall see you in the kingdom.”
“I am afraid you won’t,” says I, givin’ him a awful keen look, but pityin’. “I am afraid if you don’t turn right square round, and stop actin’, you won’t be there.”
“I shall be there,” says he, “but you won’t.”
Says I, “How do you know I won’t?”
Says he, “Because I do know it.”
Says I, with dignity, “You don’t know it.”
“Why,” says he, comin’ out plain with his biggest and heftiest argument, the main pillow in the Mormon church, “a woman can’t be saved unless some man saves ’em, some Mormon. That is one reason,” says he, “why I would have bore my cross, and married you; obtained an entrance for you in the heavenly kingdom. But now it is too late. I won’t save you.”
