“‘But I didn’t know you were present,’ he said.
“‘I tell you,’ said I, ‘I’m quite disgusted with you; a man with three wives—and me one of them—to go talking twaddle to a little chattering hussy like that, with her cat’s eyes and her red hair!’
“‘Golden hair, my dear,’ he said, ‘Charlotte’s hair is golden.’
“‘I say red!—it’s straight, staring red—as red as red can be,’ I told him; and then we had a regular fight over it. I don’t mean that we came to blows, but we had some hot words, and he went out and left us two alone. Then that young hussy was impudent, and I don’t know how it was, but somehow, when we left off our conversation, I found some of Charlotte’s red hair between my fingers; and there”—she said, innocently, holding out quite a respectable sized tuft of auburn hair—“there; I put it to you, Sister Stenhouse, is that red, or is it not?”
I was about to reply; but, without waiting an instant, she dashed the stolen locks to the ground, and said, “I daresay, Sister Stenhouse, you think me a little hasty, and yet among my friends I’ve always been quite proverbial for the calmness and evenness of my temper; but I’ve been tried very much lately, and—if only you would not keep interrupting me, dear!—if you’d just allow me to say a word or two in my turn!—I’d tell you something that would open your eyes to the ingratitude and wickedness of men. I don’t wonder that you have left the Church; I am thinking of doing so myself, and you won’t wonder at it when you hear what I’ve got to say. What do you say to my leaving the Church? Won’t people be astonished? But I declare, Sister Stenhouse, I do seriously mean to leave the Church as soon as I get my new bonnet—”
“Why your new bonnet?” I asked in surprise.
“Because, dear, I shall become an object of interest. All the sisters will have their eyes upon me, and even Gentiles will say, ‘There’s a lady who had courage to leave the Mormon Church and quit an ungrateful husband who was not worthy of her.’ And you know, Sister Stenhouse, it would not do to have people looking at me and talking about me before I got my new bonnet.”
This was a rather amusing reason for delay in changing one’s religion, but it was quite characteristic of my friend. So I humoured her a little, and tried to get her to explain how it all came about.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I ought to have told you that before, but I was to angry at what had just happened that I forgot everything else. The fact is, my husband is a man, and there’s no calculating what a man will do. Women, you know, are proverbial for the constancy of their affections and their slowness in changing their minds—you know when you’re talking to a woman that she is a woman, and you know exactly what to do with her; but with a man it’s quite different. You can’t calculate a man—you can’t fathom him. When you’ve been thinking one way and another, and at last begin to fancy you know what to do, why then, a man—if it’s him you’ve got to do with—will turn just round, and while you’ve been making everything smooth for him to do one thing, he’ll go and do exactly the opposite. I know what men are by this time, and I speak from experience.