Anne folded the letter with misted eyes and with a little prayer that her girl’s life might be much more successful and worthwhile than her own.

That’s a pretty intensely emotional moment.

Also, on the temple marriage thing, the requirements (both cultural and ecclesiastical) for temple marriages haven’t been static over time—so someone who we’d expect to or not expect to get married there now might not match expectations from 70 years ago.

And what about Anne’s unending resourcefulness? She not only handled Phyllis’s cultural education, but she’s an HVAC engineer, too?

That said, I actually love the melodramatic exaggeration of this story. It’s fun seeing it top itself again and again. And I also find the lack of identifiable Mormon signifiers interesting; it would be really interesting to do a study of the development of such things in casual fiction produced for Mormon publications (I mean it would be interesting for someone else to do. Not me. Not another project.).

Your pointing out that this is not a Mormon story is interesting. If the magazines published fiction today, you just know they would be filled with Mormon references, not just to a temple wedding but also to praying for guidance to help with the family problems, and throwing in some scriptures about marriage when speaking with Morris, or something Mormonish. But there aren’t any such references here, are there?

Yet Elsie Chamberlain Carroll was very much a Mormon, and I’m sure this serial was written specifically for the Relief Society Magazine and wasn’t something recycled from a national publication.

Some of the other serials to come are just as peculiar in that way. There will be no identifiable reference to Mormon life whatsoever until a character gets married, and suddenly they’ll rush off to Salt Lake to the temple. That’s especially noticeable in one serial (I won’t name it so as not to color your expectations) that is just plain weird all the way around, where a girl who is the last one you’d expect to marry in the temple goes to Salt Lake for her wedding — and then Mormonism is never mentioned again. In that case it’s almost as if Harry Potter had gotten his patriarchal blessing one afternoon before heading off to an evening quidditch tournament.

We think of Mormon stories today as involving Mormon characters and situations and language. I’m not sure what it meant to readers and writers and editors in the first half of the 20th century.

Ok, so after reading this installment, I am wondering: where, exactly, is this story taking place? Up ’til now, I was imagining it in the Mountain West. But then it passes without a comment about temples the idea of Suzanne getting married. It talks about there being any kind of financial development in the “western” part of the state (boy that don’t fit Utah much). That would make a whole lot more sense on how Anne might have gotten up to Boston so quick (I remember thinking that the whole train idea was a pretty amazing trip to go and come back so quick). So now I’m thinking it’s set in the Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio or Kentucky. And it’s Definitely not a Mormon story.

Did I miss something?