“I don’t like him.”  Susannah sat upright; her hands were busy with the baby upon her knee.

“Well, I dunno.”  Emma spoke meditatively.  “It said in one of Joseph’s revelations that we should dwell together in love.”

Susannah laughed; it was a bright, trilling laugh, and filled the large, low room with its sudden music.  It almost seemed like a light in the growing darkness.

“I guess I’ll light up,” said Emma, “it’ll be more cheerful.”

Susannah was still playing with the baby, and Emma looked at her critically.  “Joseph thinks a great deal of you, Mrs. Halsey; he’s told ye to teach school?”

“I have got more time than most of the women, and my husband can afford to hire a school-room.”

“’Tain’t that,” said Emma decidedly, “it’s the same thing as makes ye say that you don’t talk to any of the other folks except in a civil way.  Ye’re a bit above all the rest of us ladies in the way ye hold yerself and the way ye speak.  I guess it comes of yer father’s folks having been somebody, and then being so clever at books—­ye see, Joseph sees all that; there ain’t anything that he doesn’t see.”

Susannah perceived that there was something behind this.  “You’re not vexed, are you?”

Emma continued with more hesitation in her tones.  “No, I’m not vexed.  Why should I be?  And besides I like you and Mr. Halsey better than any of the folks, although I couldn’t let it be known.”

“There’s something that you are thinking about.”

Emma sighed deeply; her mien faltered; she subsided again into her seat by the wall and into tears.  “It’s only that I feel that Joseph’s getting to be such a great man.  Why, there’s more than a thousand folks now looking to him all the time to be told what to do, and thousands more drawing in, and Joseph beginning to wear the kid gloves whenever he goes on the street.”

There was an interval of sighs and suppressed sobs.

“Aren’t you glad?  I thought you were glad about it.”

“I declare papa and mamma were just wild when I ran away and married Joseph, because they said that he was a low fellow, and poor, and not good enough for me, and now—­and now—­I begin to feel that I’m not good enough for him.”

Susannah went over and sat beside her, chiding indignantly.  “You know very well that nobody could be the same help to him that you are, and you know very well that there’s nobody in the world that he thinks so much of as you.”  She did not say all she thought.  She considered Emma to be Smith’s superior, but that opinion would have given acute pain.

The young church worked upon Smith’s principles of thrift, temperance, and co-operation, and Kirtland rapidly assumed the proportions of a town.  Susannah became the mistress of the children’s school.  Smith was a good economist; although he helped the needy, nothing that his converts could pay for was given to them for nothing.  Hence it was that Susannah’s private purse was well filled with tuition fees.