“Your voice is little and thin,” criticised the teacher sharply. “I shall give you exercises to round it out.”
And that’s what she had done, and these were what Peggy and her faithful room-mate were practicing at the moment of the inrush of visitors.
She explained to her guests how little and thin her voice was, but they laughed scornfully and said if she had any more of a one, they’d see that she was put off campus, that, as far as they were concerned, they believed she had the biggest and the fattest voice on record, which seemed to restore Peggy’s self-respect in a way marvelous to behold.
“A person can be happy,” she assured them conversationally, “just so long as she doesn’t know anything about herself—how she talks, how she looks or how she impresses other people. But the minute you get her conscious of all these larynx-pharynx-diaphragm machines inside her she’ll never know another happy minute until she conquers them all and can speak just like a Nazimova with ’em. Though Nazimova is rather sobby, I’m told—maybe I’d better train myself up after Blanche Ring instead.”
“Peggy,” Katherine put in at this point questioningly, “don’t you think we might set the water over and give the girls some tea?”
At this delightful prospect many of the girls—especially the little lazy kimonoed ones—sat right down wherever they happened to be, in a chair or on the floor, with such looks of blissful anticipation on their faces that they were a pleasant sight. It wasn’t often tea was served in the middle of a rainy forenoon and the two Andrews freshmen were already so practiced in little parties before they came to college, that even a cup of tea served by them had a grace and an added interest, that it could not have possessed in the rooms of girls who were just tasting their first bit of life away from home.
Peggy looked in some consternation at the comfortable crowd with its expectant and gleeful expression, and demurred slowly.
“I just have to train my voice,” she said, “but I suppose, even with them here, I can go right on?”
A groan greeted this proposal that was anything but complimentary.
Peggy looked hurt. “Oh, you just wait,” she said vindictively, but with a laugh struggling for utterance at the same time. “Some day you’ll pay to hear me—see if you won’t—and I mean to work at it right along all through four years and then—and—then——” her voice grew dreamy and her eyes stared off into a heavenly future, “and then maybe I can be in the mob at senior dramatics!”