"Let the fiery, cloudy pillow,"
sang Aunt Cordelia, flinging open the refrigerator door.
What it meant, a fiery, cloudy pillow, further than that Aunt Cordelia was outdone, was another thing. Emmy Lou always intended to ask, but the very fact that Aunt Cordelia only sang it when outdone prevented—that and the additional fact that when Aunt Cordelia was outdone Emmy Lou in distress of mind was undone.
Aunt Louise waited until Aunt Cordelia, who could be seen through the open doorway, straightened up from her inspection of the refrigerator. "Still," she said, "you won't object that I entered Emmy Lou's name at Sunday school yesterday as a recruiter? To try her best and get a prize?"
"I do object if there are tickets about it," emphatically. "You can take care of them for her if so. Willie Glidden has gone mad over tickets. What with her blue tickets for attendance one place in my bureau drawer, and her pink tickets for texts in another place, I won't be bothered further."
Yet what were Sunday schools without tickets? Emmy Lou getting down from the breakfast table, her still unfinished waffle abandoned for all time now, was dumbfounded. The one thing common to all Sunday schools was tickets. Though St. Simeon's under the accelerating progressiveness of Mr. Glidden had gone further, and whereas in ordinary your accumulated tickets for every sort of prowess only got you on the honor roll, a matter of names on a blackboard, Mr. Glidden had instituted what he called "a drawing card." At St. Simeon's, now, when your blue tickets for attendance numbered four—or five those months when the calendar played you false and ran in another Sunday—you carried these back and got the Bible in Colors, a picture at a time. And, incidentally, a color at a time, too. Emmy Lou had a gratifying start in these, last month having achieved a magenta Daniel facing magenta lions in a magenta den, and this month adding a blue David with a blue sword cutting off the head of a not unreasonably bluer Goliath.
Pink tickets grow more slowly. Aunt Cordelia said that she could see to it that Emmy Lou got to Sunday school, but she could only do her best about the texts.
And she did do her best, Emmy Lou felt that she did.
"Say the text over on the way as you go," Aunt Cordelia had said to her as she started only yesterday. "That way you won't forget it before you get there."