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Show 226 time. He gave Yvonne and himself separate residences and mentioned the unhappiness of the relationship and its definitive end several times. He reduced the number of encounters with Gloriana to one or two, and transposed the girl in the bungalow back a year, stressing her separation from her husband as much as the letter of the truth would permit. When the bishop, with a grave expression, asked him if he had trouble with masturbation he said no, and afterwards felt bad about that too. During the weeks and months that followed, up until he received the letter from Church Headquarters calling him to the Great Lakes Mission, he worried that he had made an important mistake. His mother's tears of joy, his father's quiet pleasure, Sonia and Katy's excitement, Stephen's guarded admiration (disguised as sullenness), all these filled him with an unaccountable self-loathing. The night of his missionary farewell in sacrament meeting he looked down from the pulpit and saw shiny snakes squirming through the congregation, getting into people's hair, crawling over laps and entering sleeves. In the mission home, a large mansion on North State, he shared a room with six other elders for the four days of indoctrination classes and woke up each night certain that he had wet the bed, and was relieved to find he had only sweated through to the blanket. In the temple he sat shivering in a tiled booth wearing only a white shin-length poncho, open at the sides, while an elderly man dressed in white touched him on the face and under the poncho with fingers dipped in a bowl of water, and another did the same in another booth with fingers dipped in oil, and whispered Lorin's secret name into his ear. Later, dressed in white trousers, shirt, tie, and shoes, he sat with two hundred or so other nervous elders in an immense room whose walls and ceiling were covered with planets and stellar things and listened to a re-enactment of the Creation, |