Peggy’s face assumed an aggrieved expression immediately.
“It was only our lesson,” she responded somewhat sulkily.
“Lesson! My goodness, what are they giving the freshmen now that their lessons turn out to be imitations of a menagerie? Why, when I was a freshman”—(with a very superior air, for Hazel Pilcher was now enjoying all the glory of a sophomore’s exalted position)—“we had Latin and French and math and history, but I never heard of a course in ghostly noises. I’m sure that in my year they at least spared us that.”
“Just the samey that was our lesson,” Peggy persisted, “that was our practice work for to-morrow’s yell.”
“Do you mean——?” Hazel began to understand, for one cannot be a sophomore without knowing most of the abbreviations in which college terminology abounds.
“Elocution, if we have to simplify it,” said Peggy. “I suppose you girls didn’t take that course. Well, Katherine and I are just—taking it for all it’s worth. I guess we want to learn to speak correctly and place our voices right from the diaphragm and make full and open tones——”
“Spare muh!” interposed a senior who was known to be already practicing up for dramatics. “I hear nothing but that sort of thing all day long these days. I might have guessed what your vocal gymnastics meant—but they were so particularly horrible——”
“Well, the worse they sound the better they are,” murmured Peggy, deprecatingly. “And I thought myself we did it rather well.”
Elocution, or, as the girls called it with enthusiasm, yellocution or yell, was an elective course that entailed no studying, but a vast deal of labor along a different line. The victims who were beguiled into taking it, thinking to gain an easy course minus mental effort, that would count nevertheless a perfectly good two hours a week for their degree, were often mere tearful wrecks after the first few days when they were stood up before an enormous, gaping class and put through test after test to the running accompaniment of wounding comment on their enunciation, their manner, their throats, their gestures—everything.
They became acquainted for the first time with all the distressful mystery of larynxes and pharynxes—which most of them had always supposed were the names of diseases—they learned about diaphragms, too, and were forced to breathe in different ways and shout and cry “Ha-ha,” all the time feeling for the muscular hammer stroke at their waist lines. It was so embarrassing to Peggy at first that she couldn’t make any sound at all when they told her to say “Ha-ha,” and it was only after three attempts that she managed a faint and disheartened squeak.