true," Susannah said to him defiantly. "There is no
righteousness in desiring the downfall of your enemies, and earthly
wealth can never have any fixed connection with spiritual blessing."

"Do I understand you, my sister, to say that the prophet Moses did not
teach a true religion?" As he spoke he laid his hand upon a huge copy of
the Bible, bound in velvet and gold, which lay as the only ornament upon
Emma's centre table.

In these days Susannah began to have some fear of the word "apostate."
Contrary to the freedom which had existed in the Kirtland community,
the present Church, with its dogmas cast into iron moulds from the
furnace of persecution, had begun to authorise a sentiment against
perverts which differed not only in degree, but in kind, from the purely
spiritual anathemas which had formerly fallen upon them. Personally she
had no fear. The prophet knew of her unbelief, and his conduct was
increasingly kind and deferential, but for others she disliked
exceedingly the new symptoms of tyranny. Yet it was but natural, she
admitted; men who had offered their own lives in sacrifice for a creed
were likely to think it of more worth to the soul of another than his
liberty. The sin, she thought, lay chiefly with the persecutors.

Sometimes during these visits Smith came and sat beside her in her own
small room and talked to her about his plans, about new revelations
which had come to him, about the future of the Church, just as if he
were trying to persuade himself that she at last believed in the solemn
importance of these things. He said to her that her judgment would
always weigh greatly with him, that he was reserving a portion for her
in the new city such as would have belonged to her husband and child if
they had lived. He spoke of his pleasure in seeing the companionship
between herself and Emma. He spoke also of Emma's worthiness, and of her
devotion to himself.

His words about Emma were kind, but it was not thus that he had spoken
of her in the first years. Susannah perceived a change analogous to
that which she could not deny had taken place in Emma herself. In the
beginning Emma had been slim, with a spiritual look in her eyes, giving
herself to absorbed pondering over all Smith's words and ways. Now she
was stout, and was given much to the practical care of her children,
and, devoted as she was to her husband, she assumed often a tone of
remonstrance, setting aside many of Smith's vagaries as unworth