"I know you'll both get drowned if you play those tricks," says Lætitia nervously.
"No—we shan't," vociferates Sally from the brink. "Now, are you ready, Miss Prince? Very well. Tishy, count ten!"
"Oh, I wish you wouldn't! One—two—three...." And Lætitia, all whose dignity and force of character go when she is bathing, does as she is bidden, and, at the "ten," the suicide, with a cry of despair, hurls herself madly into the water, and the rescuer flies to her succour. What she has to do is to grasp the struggling quarry by the elbows from behind and keep out of the reach of her hands. But the tussle that ensues in the water is a short one, for the rescuer is no match for the supposed involuntary resistance of the convulsed suicide, who eludes the coming grasp of her hand with eel-like dexterity, and has her round
the waist and drags her under water in a couple of seconds.
"There now!" says Sally triumphantly, as they stand spluttering and choking in the shallow water to recover breath. "Didn't I do that beautifully?"
"Well, but anybody could like that. When real people are drowning they don't do it like that." Miss Prince is rather rueful about it. But Sally is exultant.
"Oh, don't they!" she says. "They're worse when it's real drowning—heaps worse!" Whereon both the other girls affirm in chorus that then nobody can be saved without the Humane Society's drags—unless, indeed, you wait till they are insensible.
"Can't they?" says Sally, with supreme contempt. "We were both of us drowned that time fair. But now you go and drown yourself, and see if I don't fish you out. Fire away!"
They fire away, and the determined suicide plays her part with spirit. But she is no match for the submarine tactics of her rescuer, who seems just as happy under water as on land, and rising under her at the end of a resolute deep plunge, makes a successful grasp at the head of her prey, who is ignominiously towed into safety, doing her best to drown herself to the last.
This little incident is so amusing and exciting that the three young ladies, who walk home together westward, can talk of nothing but rescues all the way to Notting Hill. Then Miss Henriette Prince goes on alone, and as Lætitia and Sally turn off the main road towards the home of the former, the latter says: "Now tell me about the row."