It all emphasized the need of exceeding caution in prayer. Emmy Lou never had thought of it so. Time was, in fact, when, praying her "Gentle Jesus," at Aunt Cordelia's knee, she poured it out in Aunt Cordelia's lap, so to speak, and left it there. Not that Aunt Cordelia had not made her understand that prayer goes to God. But that Aunt Cordelia who attended to everything else for her would see about getting it there.
But that was when Emmy Lou was a baby thing, and God the nebulous center of a more nebulous setting, with the kindly and cheery aspect as well as the ivory beard of—— Was it Dr. Angell, the rector of St. Simeon's? Or was there in the background of Emmy Lou's memory a yet more patriarchal face, reverent through benignity, with flowing ivory beard? A memory antedating her acquaintance with Dr. Angell? She was a big girl now, and God was not quite so nebulous nor quite so cheery. His ivory beard was longer, and in the midst of nebulæ for support was a throne. But He yet could be depended on to be kindly. Aunt Cordelia was authority for that.
Her concept of prayer, too, had moved forward; prayer in her mind's eye now taking the form of little white cocked-hat billets-doux winging out of the postbox of the heart, and, like so many white doves, speeding up to the blue of Heaven. If God was not too busy, or too bothered, as grown people sometimes are on trying days, she even could fancy Him smiling pleasantly, if absently, as grown-up people do, when the cocked-hat billets-doux, a sort of morning mail, were brought in to Him.
And so she was glad that Sadie was not going back on prayer, but was sure that her little sisters would be justified to her. Indeed, her heart had gone out to Sadie about it, and she had sent up billets-doux of her own, and would send more, that the little sisters should be justified to her.
But from this new point of view supplied by Hattie, the winging billets-doux, as in the mind's eye they sailed upward, seemed to droop a little, weighted with the need of exceeding caution in prayer. And in the light of this revelation God in His aspect changed once more, again gaining in ivory beard and in throne what He again lost in cheer.
Long ago Aunt Cordelia used to rock her to sleep with a hymn. Emmy Lou had thought she knew its words, "Behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face." Could she have reversed it? She had been known to do such things before. All this while had it been saying: "Behind a smiling providence, He hides a frowning face?"
At Emmy Lou's own home Aunt M'randy the cook, like Hattie, seemed to feel that prayer not sufficiently set around with safeguards and specifications could prove a boomerang. "Didn't I w'ar myse'f out with prayer to get rid er that no-account nigger house-boy Bob? To hev' thet prayer swing eroun' with this worse-account house-boy, Tom?"
Tom had gone to Hattie's house from Sadie's where they no longer could afford to have him, but he had not stayed there. He didn't get along with the cook. From there he came to be house-boy for Aunt Cordelia where Bob couldn't get along with the cook. Tom's idea of his importance apparently was in the number of places he had lived, and his qualifications he summed up in a phrase: "I ca'ies my good-will with me to the pussons I wuks foh."
The morning after Recruiting Sunday had been announced at St. Simeon's Sunday school, Uncle Charlie spoke of it at the breakfast table. He didn't seem to think much of it, and referred to it by another name, calling it an innovation.
Aunt Louise, on the contrary, defended it. She was teaching in the Sunday school now. "If everyone would show the energy and progressiveness of Mr. Glidden since he took the Sunday school," she said with spirit, "St. Simeon's would soon look up."