Hattie forgot her own right to grievance in the joy of this additional data in support of her position. Had she not claimed that an answer to prayer can be an answer and yet be calamitous too?
"Exactly," said Hattie. "'The least of these into the fold.' But he didn't say which fold!"
Did not say which fold? To God who knows everything? For Mr. Glidden meant his fold. Hattie, then, was right?
The concepts of Emmy Lou, eight years old, a big girl now, moved on again. Behind a smiling providence God hides a frowning face. And those winging billets-doux, already weighted with caution and now heavy with doubt, in the mind's eye faltered, hung, and came fluttering, drifting, so many falling white doves, wings broken, down from the blue.
VII
PINK TICKETS FOR TEXTS
The walls of St. Simeon's conservatism had fallen. St. Simeon's, with its arches above, its pews below, their latched doors, as it were, symbolic, the Old Dispensation depicted in the window above its entrance doors, and St. Paul, the apostle of the personal revelation, smitten to his knees by light from Heaven, the figure of the window above its chancel. Modern progressiveness, the battering-ram in the hands of Willie Glidden, come up through the Sunday school himself but yesterday, had assailed the defenses of an older generation successfully.
Or so Uncle Charlie seemed to think as he repeated the news brought from Sunday school by Aunt Louise and Emmy Lou. "Dr. Angell came into the Sunday school room this morning and offered a rector's prize for pink tickets earned for texts? Each child receiving a pink ticket for every Sunday throughout the year to be thus rewarded? Willie Glidden has goaded him to this."