“But it’s rather late to begin creating a sentiment for them here,” objected a big girl with a provoking drawl in her voice.
“Then we won’t begin,” retorted Susanna pluckily. “We’ll pretend that the sentiment is here already. We’ll be amazed—absolutely struck dumb—to find that the freshmen don’t understand about it. We will pretty nearly go into hysterics when they say that they haven’t yet made up their team. We might suggest combining the meet and the tennis tournament. I’ve often thought that would be a good idea.”
Susanna’s determined enthusiasm finally won the day. Anything was better than nothing, and her scheme had no rivals. Accordingly the bewildered freshmen found themselves, an hour or so later, fairly immersed in a strange tide of talk about a track meet. Track meets appeared suddenly to be the end and consummation of the Harding year. Nothing else in spring term mattered. The junior-senior meet was unimportant, like the junior-senior basket-ball game; after you stopped taking “required gym.” you naturally lost interest and got out of form. But the freshman-sophomore match was the event of the spring term. Bewildering allusions to broad and high jumps, to dashes, hurdle races, and hammer throws, mingled with ready references to the class champions, Binks and Susanna being prominent among them. It was a flood of sudden, unexpected, overwhelming oratory. The freshmen, dazed and blinded, retired to talk the matter over in private, and the sophomores retired also, to wonder whether they had opened fire too soon, and to arrange a program and assign parts.
“And now for practice. We mustn’t take chances. We must do so well that we can’t help winning,” decreed Susanna inexorably.
Every afternoon, accordingly, the sophomores who could run panted around the track in the hot gymnasium, and those who could jump were busy on the floor with bars and “horses.” Every possible candidate was forced to try out her powers. It was to be as complete a “whitewash” of those tricky little freshmen as infinite pains could achieve.
Meanwhile the freshmen consulted with the gym. director, who was secretly amazed and openly delighted at the sudden display of interest in her department. Miss Andrews picked a provisional team, superintended strenuous practice hours, and mingled praise and encouragement with tactful references to the extra year’s training and rather exceptional ability of the sophomores—“foemen worthy of your steel, by whom it’s an honor to be beaten.”
The freshmen managed to see enough of the sophomores’ work to understand that their case was indeed hopeless, but they were not at all attracted by the honors of defeat. So they practiced harder than ever and thereby lost their best jumper, who sprained a knee in her frantic efforts to outdo herself.
This was felt by the freshmen to be a crisis. The jumper’s room was deluged with violets, and the rest of the team all at once became pampered darlings, for whom no attention was too delicate or too flattering. Even the basket-ball team had never been the center of more anxious consideration.
“It would be a perfect shame to lose.” So ran the popular clamor.
“The squad hasn’t any hope of winning.”