"But if their husbands die off?" suggested a puzzled listener.
"The husband's successor marries his widders," explained Brother Jarrum. "Look at our late head and prophet, Mr. Joe Smith—him that appeared in a vision to our present prophet, and pointed out the spot for the new temple. He died a martyr, Mr. Joe Smith did—a prey to wicked murderers. Were his widders left to grieve and die out after him? No. Mr. Brigham Young, he succeeded to his honours, and he married the widders."
This was received somewhat dubiously; the assemblage not clear whether to approve it or to cavil at it.
"Not so much to be his wives, you know, as to be a kind of ruling matrons in his household," went on Brother Jarrum. "To have their own places apart, their own rooms in the house, and to be as happy as the day's long. They don't—"
"How they must quarrel, a lot of wives together!" interrupted a discontented voice.
Brother Jarrum set himself energetically to disprove this supposition. He succeeded. Belief is easy to willing minds.
"Which is best?" asked he.—"To be one of the wives of a rich saint, where all the wives is happy, and honoured, and well dressed; or to toil and starve, and go next door to naked, as a poor man's solitary wife does here? I know which I should choose if the two chances was offered me. A woman can't put her foot inside the heavenly kingdom, I tell you, unless she has got a husband to lay hold of her hand and draw her in. The wives of a saint are safe; paradise is in store for 'em; and that's why the Gentiles' wives—them folks that's for ever riling at us—leave their husbands to marry the saints."
"Does the saints' wives ever leave 'em to marry them others—the Gentiles?" asked that troublesome Davies.
"Such cases have been heered of," responded Brother Jarrum, shaking his head with a grave solemnity of manner. "They have braved the punishment and done it. But the act has been rare."
"What is the punishment?" inquired somebody's wife.