Page:Angela Brazil--the leader of the lower school.djvu/148

138 generally made it extremely difficult for her to keep order. In vain she alternately pleaded, conciliated, flustered, fumed, and even threatened. The girls would not behave seriously, and though they did not deign to laugh at her attempts at humour, they treated her as a joke. As she was decidedly stout and rosy they nicknamed her "German Sausage", and made fun of her almost to her face.

A part of Fräulein Hochmeyer's system of voice production which her pupils much detested was learning the proper position of the mouth. It was of course a most important and necessary part of the lesson, but owing to the way it was enforced the silly girls turned it all into ridicule. Fräulein would stand upon the platform giving a practical demonstration to show how the lips must be well drawn back, revealing the teeth parted about the third of an inch, so as to offer no obstruction to the free passage of the voice; and she would require her pupils to stand at attention with their mouths thus fixed before beginning the preliminary exercises.

"We look like a set of grinning imbeciles!" complained Lennie Chapman, "with Sausage for the arch-lunatic of us all. I wish to goodness we had a decent English teacher! I don't like these foreign ways."

"You'd like it still less if you were turned into a pattern pupil like me!" grumbled Gipsy. "I hate making an exhibition of myself."

Gipsy, being an apt copyist, was able to set her mouth at exactly the right angle, and in consequence