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.