AMUSING TROUBLES OF MY TALKATIVE FRIEND—CHARLOTTE WITH THE GOLDEN HAIR!  
Not long after our separation from the Mormon Church, I received another visit from my talkative friend.
As, according to her custom, she was making a preliminary “fuss” at the door before entering, I heard her voice, and was at a loss to conjecture whether she came for the purpose of lamenting my apostasy and entreating my immediate return to the bosom of the Church, or to condole with me concerning the brutal outrage to which we had been subjected. In both suppositions I was, however, mistaken—she came to talk about her own woes.
“You’ll be surprised, my dear Sister Stenhouse,” she said, “to see me looking so utterly miserable. I’m sure I must look the picture of despair, and I feel it. You don’t know what I’ve been suffering, and how shamefully I have been used.”
“You look very well I think, but I’m sorry to hear you have met with any difficulty,” said I, when she stopped for a moment to take breath.
“Oh, you may say so,” she replied, “but you know you don’t think so in your heart. Why, I did not even stop to put on my bonnet straight,” she said, stealing a look at the glass, “and I ran all the way here, for I felt as if I should die if I could not pour my sorrows into the bosom of some faithful-hearted friend. Oh, I have been treated shamefully, and I feel it the more as you know what a reserved woman I am, and how seldom it is that I open my lips about family matters, even to my dearest friends!”
“Well, but,” I said, “what really is the matter? You have not yet told me what your trouble is.”
“Sister Stenhouse,” she said, “you have had a few little vexations in the course of your life, I know, but they are nothing to compare to the frightful indignities that I have suffered in the course of the last few days. I never thought[362] I should come to this! I hate every man in the place, and I detest my husband most of all, and I loathe his wives, and I execrate Brother Brig—”
“Why, Sister Ann, what can have happened?” I exclaimed, interrupting her.
“Happened!” she cried, starting from her chair in indignation, “I tell you, Sister Stenhouse, nothing has ‘happened’—nothing was done by chance—he did it all with his eyes open and against my advice—I tell you he did it on purpose!”
“Did what?” I asked, “and who was it that did it?” But by this time I had begun to form a shrewd guess who the culprit was.
“Why, he married that wretched little shrimp of a girl, with blue eyes and red hair, and a die-away, lackadaisical manner—it was he—my husband Henry—he married her this very day, and I tell you he did it on purpose!”
“I’m sorry that it annoys you,” I said; “but really I am surprised, after all you have said to me, that you should not care if he had taken half-a-dozen wives, to say nothing of the one he married this morning, and who you say is only a very little one.”
“It doesn’t matter the size, Sister Stenhouse,” she said, “but the colour of the eyes and the shade of the hair matters a great deal. If that miserable little minx had had black hair or green eyes, I daresay Henry would not have cared two straws about her, unless he had done it out of sheer perversity, for all men are made of the same contrary stuff. But he dotes on blue eyes; I heard him myself tell her so one day, when I was listening to them through the crack of the door, and they didn’t know I was so near. But my wounded feelings would not suffer me to remain silent, and I bounced in, and, said I, ‘Henry, how dare you talk such outrageous nonsense to that child in my presence?’
“‘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,[363] 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.
[364]
“It was just so with Henry and this girl. He has gone quite against the grain with me, and I feel it all the more because he used to be so quiet and anxious to do exactly what I wanted. But he doesn’t care a fig now whether I’m pleased or not—he only thinks about this red-headed girl. In fact, he’s quite crazy about her, and if there’s any sin in apostasy, you may remember that it was he who drove me into it.”
“That seems hardly fair,” I said, “for you knew all along that it was his privilege to take more wives.”
“That’s very true,” she exclaimed; “it is his privilege to take wives, but it’s my privilege to choose them for him. I’m a good Mormon, and I don’t mind how many wives my husband takes, if he’ll only ............