"With one pink ticket in hand, fifty-one yet to be achieved for texts."
The other boy was at church too. By turning her head the least bit Emmy Lou could see him. His name was Logan. But he wasn't trying for a prize. He said they might make him stay to church—"they" meaning the grown persons in the pew with him—but they couldn't make him try for pink tickets, or walk up an aisle to get a prize he mightn't want anyway.
Mightn't Logan want it? Was there any chance that Emmy Lou would not want hers? Fifty-two—no, fifty-one—Sundays now to come, and with one pink ticket in hand, fifty-one yet to be achieved for texts.
Dr. Angell is ending his sermon. ". . . and so it comes that the words of the Psalmist occurring in the liturgy of our service, are a lamp unto our feet, and a light unto our path." And he and his congregation come up out of the valley of dry bones.
And yet? And yet? Emmy Lou's eyes, fixed on Dr. Angell, are registering on the retina of her mind for all time a figure which for her shall be a type, dominant in its attitude of beneficent authority, hands outspread above its people, rumpled hair white, beard white, robes white, a shaft of light from a common window into heaven shared with him by St. Paul, the bigoted Episcopalian, searching him out where he stands.
As void of meaning to her, these gettings up and these sittings down, these venites, jubilates, and amens, as the purpose of Dr. Angell in his chancel. Yet who shall say at what moment Emmy Lou in her pew, struggling along in the darkness though she is, shall sense the symbol of the one, and behold in the other the office and the appointment?
And the adult who is here of self-actuated volition? The Aunt Cordelia ever in her place in the family pew? Emmy Lou's eyes turn to this person, and behold, her face is touched as by a light, too, and her eyes are shining.
"Get up," she whispers as she herself arises, "it is the benediction."
Uncle Charlie is jocular on the way home. "And what did you think of the sermon?" he asks Emmy Lou.