You hear a good deal about that "cross" [of polygamy]
from both Mormon husbands and wives, but you only see the
shadow of it in the faces of the women. I do not mean to
intimate that they all look decidedly unhappy. There is
rather in their faces a quiet, baffling, negative, and
abnegative expression, which certainly is as far from happy
content as it is from desperate rebellion. Naturally, they
are more alive to the outside pressure of public opinion,
more sensitive to the obloquy and ostracism which their
position provokes, than men. Patient and passive as they
same, they feel these things keenly, -- the more intelligent
among them, at least; and, though upheld by a sincere faith
in this strange delusion, they have toward strangers a
peculiar air of reticence and mistrust, almost of repulsion.
I do not wonder at it: their hospitality and confidence have
often been abused; they have been intruded upon by
impertinent interviewers, and their reluctant answers to
persistent questioning published abroad, with startling
additions and dramatic embellishments. Those I have met
appear to me, I must say, like good and gentle Christian
women. They are singularly simple in dress and modest in
demeanor. What saddens me is their air of extreme quietude,
retirement, and repression. But for the children around them,
you would think some of them were women who had done with
this world. I am told that the wives of even the highest
Mormon dignitaries show little pride in their lords. It were,
perhaps, difficult to feel much pride in the sixteenth part
of a man, as men go. Even the first wife of a wealthy saint
betrays in her husband and household, they say, no exultant
joy of possession. An investment in a Mormon heart and home
must be rather uncertain stock for a woman. I am assured that
the second wife is seldom taken without the consent of the
first. Not only are the poor woman's religious faith and zeal
appealed to, but her magnanimity toward her sister-woman out
in the cold. It must be through great suffering that such
heights of self-abnegation are reached. The crucifixion of
the divine weakness of a loving woman's heart must be a
severe process. But there is some sorry comfort in the
thought that for these poor polygamous wives there is no
wearing uncertainty, no feverish anxiety; that they are
spared the bitterest pain of jealousy, the vague nightmare
torture of suspicion, the grief and horror of the final
discovery, the fierce sense of treachery and deception. They
know they worst. Perhaps it is this "dead certainty" that
gives them the peculiar, cold, still look I have referred to.
As to the Mormon men whom I have met, mostly leaders in the
church, and prominent, well-to-do citizens, I must say that
they look remarkably care-free and even jolly, under the
cross. Virgil, I believe, has somewhere the expression, "O
three times and four times happy!" Well, that is the way they
look.
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