“And so you gave it?”
“Yes. Oh, sir, it was like consenting to have my heart torn from my bosom!” she exclaimed in a low tone tremulous with pain. “But to withhold it would do no good, and would endanger my life—my life, no longer valuable save for the sake of my dear children: but for their sake I did desire to live. Ah, sir, I could not but ask myself, ‘Is this what it is to live in free America?’”
“I blush for my country, in view of the outrages she has allowed in the name of religion!” he exclaimed, his fine, manly countenance flushing with shame and indignation as he spoke. “And yet,” he continued interrogatively, “you came to believe it right for a man thus to break his marriage vow?”
“I grew bewildered with misery,” she said. “I had no choice but to submit, and felt that I should go mad with the thought of my husband’s wickedness if I held fast to the teachings of my childhood. I could not answer their arguments (ah, I see now that more prayer and searching of the Scriptures might have enabled me to do so; yet the result would have been a violent death; probably by Willie’s own hand, making him a murderer as well as—a breaker of the seventh commandment), so I resigned myself to my fate—so far as I could—and have ever since been fighting with the anguish and rebellion in my broken heart.”
She was silent for a moment, struggling with her emotion, then with a grateful look at him, “I don’t know how it is, sir, that you have so quickly won my confidence,” she said. “I have never before breathed a word of all this into any mortal ear. Even Marian knows no more than that I suffer because—other women share the affection that in former, happier days was all my own.”
“It is sometimes a relief to unburden our hearts to a fellow-creature,” he replied; “there is healing and comfort in human sympathy, and I assure you, dear madam, that you have mine in no slight measure. The man who can so wound the heart of a loving wife must be worse than a brute.
“But the government has at last come to the rescue of these oppressed wives. I trust the Edmunds Bill will prove the complete destruction of polygamy, and efface this bar sinister from my country’s scutcheon.”
“I cannot but desire it, if only for my daughter’s sake,” she returned. “Marian will soon be a woman, and, if your government does not help, may be forced into a polygamous marriage. She would never go into it of her own free will; she is no Mormon, but, young as she is, has always declared intense hatred and abhorrence of both polygamy and the blood atonement doctrine—and practice,” she added, after a moment’s hesitation.
“Oh, sir, no small part of my suffering is occasioned by the change in my child’s feelings toward her father; from loving him with an ardent affection, she has turned to hating him with a bitter hatred, as the destroyer of her mother’s peace and happiness.”
She ended with a burst of uncontrollable weeping.