orded a view of him consisting of a little hair
and one bored ear. The sermon--a noble one, searching and eloquent--was
but a persistent sound in that ear, though, now and then, Penrod's
attention would be caught by some detached portion of a sentence, when
his mind would dwell dully upon the phrases for a little while and lapse
into a torpor. At intervals his mother, without turning her head, would
whisper, "Sit up, Penrod," causing him to sigh profoundly and move his
shoulders about an inch, this mere gesture of compliance exhausting all
the energy that remained to him.

The black backs and gray heads of the elderly men in the congregation
oppressed him; they made him lethargic with a sense of long lives of
repellent dullness. But he should have been grateful to the lady with
the artificial cherries upon her hat. His gaze lingered there, wandered
away, and hopelessly returned again and again, to be a little refreshed
by the glossy scarlet of the cluster of tiny globes. He was not so
fortunate as to be drowsy; that would have brought him some relief--and
yet, after a while, his eyes became slightly glazed; he saw dimly, and
what he saw was distorted.

The church had been built in the early 'Seventies, and it contained
some naive stained glass of that period. The arch at the top of a window
facing Penrod was filled with a gigantic Eye. Of oyster-white and raw
blues and reds, inflamed by the pouring sun, it had held an awful place
in the infantile life of Penrod Schofield, for in his tenderer years he
accepted it without question as the literal Eye of Deity. He had been
informed that the church was the divine dwelling--and there was the Eye!

Nowadays, being no longer a little child, he had somehow come to know
better without being told, and, though the great flaming Eye was no
longer the terrifying thing it had been to him during his childhood, it
nevertheless retained something of its ominous character. It made him
feel spied upon, and its awful glare still pursued him, sometimes, as
he was falling asleep at night. When he faced the window his feeling was
one of dull resentment.

His own glazed eyes, becoming slightly crossed with an ennui that was
peculiarly intense this morning, rendered the Eye more monstrous than it
was. It expanded to horrible size, growing mountainous; it turned into
a volcano in the tropics, and yet it stared at him, indubitably an Eye
implacably hostile to all rights of privacy forever. Penr