The foreigners entered into the spirit of it and retorted with burlesques of Carthagese. They were received with excellent sportsmanship. One might have been led to believe that the Carthaginians took the matter of pronunciation lightly, since they could laugh tolerantly at foreigners. This, however, was because the foreigners had missed advantages of Carthaginian standards.
Emma Terriberry's crime was not in her pronunciation, but in the fact that she had changed it. Having come from Carthage, she must forever remain a Carthagenian or face down a storm of wrath. Her quarrel with her lover was the beginning of a quarrel with the whole town.
Arthur Litton became suddenly a hero, like the first man wounded in a war. The town rallied to his support. Emma was a heartless wretch, who had insulted a faithful lover because he would not become as abject a toady to the hateful East as she was. Her new name became a byword. Her pronunciations were heard everywhere in the most ruthless parody. She was accused of things that she never had said, things that nobody could ever say.
They inflicted on her the impossible habit of consistency. She was reported as calling a hat a "hot," a rat a "rot," of teaching her little sister to read from the primer, "Is the cot on the mot?" Pronunciation became a test of character. The soft "r" and the hard "a" were taken as proofs of effeminate hypocrisy.
Carthage differed only in degree, not in kind, from old Italy at the time of the "Sicilian Vespers," when they called upon everybody to pronounce the word "ciceri." The natives who could say "chee-cheree" escaped, but the poor French who could come no nearer than "seeseree" were butchered. Gradually now in Carthage the foreigners from Massachusetts, Georgia, England, and elsewhere ceased to be regarded with tolerance. Their accents no longer amused. They gave offense.
In the railroad office there were six or seven of these new-comers. They were driven together by indignation. They took up Amélie's cause; made her their queen; declined invitations in which she was not included; gave parties in her honor: took her buggy-riding. Each had his day.
A few girls could not endure her triumph. They broke away from the fold and became renegades, timidly softening their speech. This infuriated the others, and the town was split into Guelph and Ghibelline.
Amélie enjoyed the notoriety immensely. She flaunted her success. She ridiculed the Carthage people as yokels. She burlesqued their jargon as outrageously as they hers.
The soda-water fountains became battle-fields of backbiting and mockery. The feuds were as bitter, if not as deadly, as those that flourished around the fountains in medieval Italian towns. Two girls would perch on the drug-store stools back to back, and bicker in pretended ignorance of each other's presence. Tudie Litton would order "sahsahpahrillah," which she hated, just to mock Amélie's manner; and Amélie, assuming to be ignorant of Tudie's existence, would retort by ordering "a strorrburry sody wattur." Then each would laugh recklessly but miserably.
The church at which the Terriberrys worshiped was almost torn apart by the matter. The more ardent partisans felt that Amélie's unrepentant soul had no right in the sacred edifice. Others urged that there should be a truce to factions there, as in heaven. One Sunday dear old Dr. Brearley, oblivious of the whole war, as of nearly everything else less than a hundred years away, chose as his text Judges xii: 6: