a past made
beautiful by his love for her mother,--by a thousand youthful dreams and
fancies and wayward hopes that he had kept fresh through all the years;
torn between Brigham, whose word was as the word of God, and Prudence
who was the living flower of her dead mother and all his dead hopes.

Could he persuade Brigham to leave her? The idea of refusing him, if he
should persist, was not seriously to be thought of. For twenty-five
years he, in common with the other Saints, had held Brigham's lightest
command to be above all earthly law; to be indeed the revealed will of
God. His kingship in things material no less than in things spiritual
had been absolute, undisputed, undoubted--indeed, gloried in by the
people as much as Brigham himself gloried when he declared it in and out
of the tabernacle. Their blind obedience had been his by divine right,
by virtue of his iron will, his matchless courage, his tireless spirit,
and his understanding of their hearts and their needs, born of his
common suffering with them. Nothing could be done without his sanction.
No man could enter a business, or change his home from north to south,
without first securing his approval; even the merchants who went east or
west for goods must first report to him their wishes, to see if he had
contrary orders for them! From the invitation list of a ball to the
financing of a corporation, his word was law; in matters of marriage as
well--no man daring even to seek a wife until the Prophet had approved
his choice. The whole valley for five hundred miles was filled with his
power as with another air that the Saints must breathe. In his
oft-repeated own phrase, it was his God-given right to dictate all
matters, "even to the ribbons a woman should wear, or the setting up of
a stocking." And his people had not only submitted blindly to his rule,
but had reverenced and even loved him for it.

Twenty-five years of such allegiance, preceded by a youth in which the
same gospel of obedience was bred into his marrow--this was not to be
thrown off by a mere heartache; not to be more than striven against,
half-heartedly, in the first moment of anguish.

He thought of Brigham's home in the Lion House, the score or so of
plain, elderly women, hard-working, simple-minded; the few favourites of
his later years, women of sightlier exteriors; and he pictured the long
dining-room, where, at three o'clock each afternoon, to the sound of a
bell, these wives and half