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Show 224 to get lost when they did. She was sorry, but that was that. Sometimes they did get let in, and even met the husband, who either scowled and left the room or sat slouched at the far end of the sofa and looked bored, or- on the very rare occasion when he chose to be polite-shook their hands, smiled, and tolerated them. Sometimes they got as far as the second or third visit before they were stopped. "Sure, sonny. Gold plates. Heh, heh." He lay awake nights wondering if he was being punished for waiting so long. Sorenson was his third companion, and the most congenial one. His first one, Elder Cobb, had been a fat, happy country boy from Georgia, with spaces between his teeth and too much Brylcream on his hair. Lorin had made the mistake once of calling him by his first name, so startling him that for the remaining two months they were together Cobb never seemed quite at ease with him and never went to sleep before Lorin did. His second companion Lorin frankly disliked. This was Elder Beech, whose father was a bishop and also an expensive attorney in Phoenix. Elder Beech wore a crew cut, preached eloquently, had a peculiar frozen smile and found stories about people breaking bones unbearably funny. (He was fond, for instance, of reliving a football game he had played the year before as a sophomore in college in which, as a running end, he had carried the ball across a stack of teammates and opponents and had landed heavily, cleats and all, on the back of a hand stuck out of the pile. He even supplied the sound when he told the story.) Elder Cobb had finished his mission and gone home to marry the girl he had left behind (the joke among missionaries was that you lost either your hair or your girl while you were in the field; Cobb had kept both and gained forty pounds.) Beech had been made a district leader and was given for his junior companion a young elder from California whose family had coerced him into serving a |