"Try, then," suggested Margaret. "Perhaps you can if you try. Try."
Frances, rather gingerly, got out of her chair, gave a flap with her arms and a little stamp with both feet, and up to the ceiling she went like a feather. It was a high ceiling, but she went up far enough to touch it with her fingers, when she began gently floating down again, her dress standing out all around like a pink umbrella. She looked so comical, with her elbows tucked into her sides and her fingers spread out, her lips puckered up and her eyebrows raised, that Margaret could not help laughing.
"Oh, what fun!" she cried, seizing the tweezers and the glass of aëro-plane water. "I'm coming too. Can you wait there, Frances?"
Began gently floating down again
"No, I can't," replied her sister, who was now down about the level of the tops of the pictures. "I'm coming down all the time. And if I were you, Margaret," she added hastily, "I'd only take two of those bubbles—or one. I'm rather too light. It's a good thing I didn't take all six of them or I might have gone straight up to the ceiling and had to stay there, crawling about like a fly. I wonder if—hand me the lemonade, will you?"
Margaret dragged a chair to the spot, jumped upon it and handed up the half-glass of lemonade to her sister. Frances, however, did not take the glass in her hand; she took the straws, and leaning forward, tried to drink the lemonade. But though Margaret stood on tip-toe and reached up as far as she could, Frances was still about four inches too high, so she waited a minute until she had come down a little further when she tried again. This time she succeeded, finding, as she had expected, that at every swallow she came down more and more quickly, until presently her feet touched the floor again, when, as she was still rather bouncy, she took hold of the edge of the table to steady herself, and said:
"I'll tell you what you'd better do, Margaret: Take only one of those bubbles at a time and see if it isn't enough. I'm a good deal too light; I shall have to put some stones in my pocket, or something. I'm afraid, if I were to go out of doors, the wind might blow me into the sea. So just take one first, Margaret, and see how that does."
This seemed like good advice, so Margaret, taking the tweezers, caught one bubble and ate it up.