"
The ponies took last drags at their cigarettes and slumped into place;
the leading lady rushed into the foreground, setting his hands and feet
in an atmospheric mince; and as the coach clapped and stamped and tumped
and da-da'd, they hashed out a dance.
A great, seething ant-hill was the Triangle Club. It gave a musical
comedy every year, travelling with cast, chorus, orchestra, and scenery
all through Christmas vacation. The play and music were the work
of undergraduates, and the club itself was the most influential of
institutions, over three hundred men competing for it every year.
Amory, after an easy victory in the first sophomore Princetonian
competition, stepped into a vacancy of the cast as Boiling Oil, a Pirate
Lieutenant. Every night for the last week they had rehearsed "Ha-Ha
Hortense!" in the Casino, from two in the afternoon until eight in the
morning, sustained by dark and powerful coffee, and sleeping in lectures
through the interim. A rare scene, the Casino. A big, barnlike
auditorium, dotted with boys as girls, boys as pirates, boys as babies;
the scenery in course of being violently set up; the spotlight man
rehearsing by throwing weird shafts into angry eyes; over all the
constant tuning of the orchestra or the cheerful tumpty-tump of a
Triangle tune.
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