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Show 260 Oliver Cowdery, and the formal organizing of the church. Alice was disappointed. "Do you guys believe all that?" she asked. Sorenson smiled. "It asks a lot, doesn't it?" "I thought it was kind of boring, if you want to know," she said. Sorenson's smile turned a shade cold. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said. "Which parts did you find boring?" "I don't know," she said, turning over several rumpled pages on which Lorin could see heavy underlinings and an occasional scribble in the margin. "This thing that happens to him-you know the place I mean? He's praying in the woods and something happens to him before he has the vision. Something is holding him down so he can't move and it starts to get dark?" "Yes," said Sorenson. "What is that?" Sorenson lifted his shoulders. "Joseph Smith thought it was something that didn't want him to have the vision. Call it whatever you like." "I don't know what to call it." The correct answer, of course, would have been the devil, but Sorenson knew when restraint was advisable, and Lorin was keeping his mouth shut on this visit, having promised himself he wouldn't interfere. Anyway he was busy noticing a run that had started in the toe of one of Alice's stockings and remembering a mannerism of Gloriana's that had always interested him. When Gloriana was feeling especially prim, perhaps the tiniest bit irritated with him, a change would sometimes come over her vowels, as though she were trying to sound British. "That's not necess'ry," she had said once when he had timidly suggested an interesting improvisation in the front seat of his car. And once during a complicated arrangement of knees and elbows involving a pillow among dry leaves on a hillside behind |