The Mormon girl is reared to believe that the plurality-wife system
as it is delicately called here is strictly right; and in linking
her destiny with a man who has twelve wives, she undoubtedly
considers she is doing her duty. She loves the man, probably, for
I think it is not true, as so many writers have stated, that girls
are forced to marry whomsoever "the Church" may dictate. Some
parents no doubt advise, connive, threaten, and in aggravated cases
incarcerate here, as some parents have always done elsewhere, and
always will do as long as petticoats continue to be an institution.

How these dozen or twenty wives get along without heart-burnings
and hairpullings I can't see.

There are instances on record, you know, where a man don't live in
a state of uninterrupted bliss with ONE wife. And to say that a
man can possess twenty wives without having his special favorite,
or favorites, is to say that he is an angel in boots--which is
something I have never been introduced to. You never saw an angel
with a Beard, although you may have seen the Bearded Woman.

The Mormon woman is early taught that man, being created in the
image of the Saviour, is far more godly than she can ever be, and
that for her to seek to monopolize his affections is a species of
rank sin. So she shares his affections with five or six or twenty
other women, as the case may be.

A man must be amply able to support a number of wives before he can
take them. Hence, perhaps, it is that so many old chaps in Utah
have young and blooming wives in their seraglios, and so many young
men have only one.