Her case was typical of many that came to my personal knowledge. At the Sunday Schools, in the choirs, in the joint meetings of mutual improvement associations, young girls--taught to believe that plural marriage was sacred, and reverencing the polygamous prophets as the anointed of the Lord--were being seduced into clandestine marriage relations with polygamous elders who persuaded their victims that the anti-polygamous manifesto had been given out to save a persecuted people from the cruelties of an unjust government; that it was never intended it should be obeyed; that all the celestial blessings promised by revelation to the polygamist and his wives were still waiting for those who would dare to enjoy them. If the tempted girl turned to one of her women friends, and besought her to say, on her honor, whether she thought that plural marriage was right, the other was likely enough to answer: "Yes, yes. Indeed it is. Promise me you won't tell a living soul. Tell me you'll die first.... I'm married to Brother I,----, the leader of the ward choir." If she asked her mother: "Tell me. Is plural marriage wrong?" the mother could only reply: "Oh--I don't know--I don't know. Your father said it was right, and I accepted it--and we practiced it--and you have always loved your other brothers and sisters, and it seems to me it can't be wrong, since we have lived it. But--Oh, I don't know, daughter. I don't know." The man who is tempting her knows. He has the word of an apostle, the example of the Prophet, the secret teaching of the Church. He courts her as any other religious young girl might be courted--with little attentions, at the meetings, over the music books--and he has, to aid him, a religious exaltation in her, induced by his plea that she is to enter into the mystery of the holy covenant, to become one of the most faithful of a persecuted Church, to defy the wicked laws of its enemies. She is just as happy in her betrothal as any other innocent girl of her age. Even the secrecy is sweet to her. And then, some evening, they saunter down a side street to a strange house--or even to a back orchard where a man is waiting in a cowl under a tree (perhaps vulgarly disguised as a woman with a veil over his face)--and they are married in a mutter of which she hears nothing. Such a case was related to me by a horrified mother who had discovered that the marriage ceremony had been performed by an accomplice of the libertine who had seduced her daughter and since confessed his crime. But whether the ceremony be performed by a priest of the Church or by a more unauthorized scoundrel, the girl is equally at the mercy of her "husband" and equally betrayed in the world. Even in this case of the pretended marriage, the elders of the ward hushed up the threatened prosecution because the authorities of the Church objected to a proceeding that might expose other plural marriages more orthodox.