"Oh, pooh!" Peggy said. "In the last two weeks, I'll bet Amy and I have walked around more of New York than either of you has in the last two years! And that included some pretty tough-looking neighborhoods, and nobody bothered us, and everybody was very nice. I think that's a lot of nonsense! Besides, we're big girls, and we can take care of ourselves by now."
"We certainly can," Amy agreed. "And I plan to go, too, just the way I've dragged my aching feet after Peggy for two weeks now. That girl can cover more territory in a morning than a Tennessee Walking Horse can manage in a whole day!"
"Well, if you really want to try, it's okay with me," Randy said. "And I'm grateful to you for wanting to. If you need any help along the way, be sure to ask for it."
"You can start by giving me a list of all the places you've gone to, so I won't waste my time, and I'll take it from there."
Randy promised to bring the list to the Academy the next day, at which time, if it was okay with Peggy and Amy, he would like to join them for lunch. Then their interest turned to other things, including more coffee for the girls and another huge sandwich to be split between the boys.
By the time they had finished and walked to the Gramercy Arms, it was nearly midnight. Peggy and Amy whispered quiet good nights on the stairs, and hurried up to bed. Tomorrow was school again, and they needed all the sleep they could get.
"Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; a peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?"
"A perfect peck of pickled peppers, Peggy," said Miss Linden, the elocution instructor, "except that you picked them a trifle too quickly. That's the big temptation of tongue twisters; you always want to show that you can rip them out at great speed without making a mistake. What I want you to do this time is to say the same thing, but to concentrate on a normal rate of delivery that will allow your voice to carry to the rear of a hall without becoming blurred. Distance, you know, tends to make sounds run together. Now, Peggy, if you don't mind...."
More slowly this time, and concentrating on making her words reach the back of some huge, imaginary hall, Peggy once more spoke the tongue twister.