There's Emmar and me, we'd be in more trouble if you lost one of your pretty fingers than you would have been in if they had taken and killed us over there in Missouri." He added, "If you were another woman, and had not the power to do more than just have a little shallow caring for one and another, where would be your sin ?" Something that she had dimly suspected of herself flashed into apparent truth.

Ephraim, too, had perhaps intended to tell her this when he had said that love, not knowledge, was needed.

She had not loved Halsey and his child as she might have loved.
Susannah had always recognised a certain bigness in Smith's character because of the power he had of giving himself to man, woman, and child; now she felt her own inferiority.

Was she to stand babbling to him about hallucinations and gold plates?
The man in him had flashed out at her, and because she was not without the heart whose whereabouts he had demanded, the flash awakened an answering fire.

Her cheeks flushed, not with self-consciousness, but with the slow gathering of heart-stricken tears.
"And you," she said slowly, "you have poured out blood and soul for us all freely, but why ?" The imperious need of truth awoke again.