It slipped. She knew that she was gone.
She made frenzied clutches at the air, but it would not sustain her.
She was strangely sincere now in her gestures. The crowd laughed--
then stopped short.
It was funny till it looked as if the nymph might be hurt. Jim
Dyckman darted forward to save her. He knocked Charity aside roughly
and did not know it. He arrived too late to catch Kedzie.
Kedzie sat into the pool with great violence. The spray she cast up
fatally spotted several delicate robes. That would have been of some
consolation to Kedzie if she had known it. But all she knew was that
she went backward into the wrong element. Her wrath was greater than
her sorrow.
Her head went down: she swallowed a lot of water, and when she kicked
herself erect at last she was half strangled, entirely drenched, and
quite blinded. The other nymphs, wood and water, giggled and shook
with sisterly affection.
Kedzie was the wettest dryad that ever was. She stumbled forward,
groping. Jim Dyckman bent, slipped his hands under her arms,
and hoisted her to land. He felt ludicrous, but his chivalry was
automatic.
Kedzie was so angry at herself and everybody else that she flung
off his hands and snapped, "Quit it, dog on it!"
Jim Dyckman quit it. He had for his pains an insult and a suit
of clothes so drenched that he had to go back to his yacht, running
the gantlet of a hundred ridicules.
When he vanished Kedzie found herself in garments doubly clinging
from being soaked.
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