“How disgusting!  Well, on the whole I’m tolerably satisfied to belong to the poor old twentieth century.  It might be better, but it might be worse.”

“How kind of you!  I’m sure posterity will be grateful for your approval.”

“D’you want me to push you into the water, Winona Woodward?  I will, in half a second!”

At the end of the course it was arranged that a swimming contest should take place among the girls, and that various prizes should be offered for championships.  It was the first event of the kind in the annals of the school, so naturally it aroused much enthusiasm.  About thirty candidates were selected by Miss Medland as eligible for competitions, the rest of her pupils having to content themselves with looking on.  A special afternoon was given up to the display, and invitations were sent out to parents to come and help to swell the audience.

“Are you in for the mermaidens’ fete?” Winona asked Marjorie Kemp.

“Mermaidens’ fete, indeed!  How romantic we are all of a sudden!  The frog fight, I should call it.”

“There speaks the voice of envy!  You’re evidently out of it.”

“Don’t want to be in it, thanks!  It’ll be wretched work shivering round the edge of the bath for a solid hour!”

“Sour grapes, my child!” teased Winona.

“Go on, my good girl—­if you want to make me raggy, you just shan’t succeed, that’s all!”

“Now I should like to have been chosen!” mourned Evelyn Richards.  “I don’t mind confessing that I’ve had a disappointment.  I thought I could swim quite as well as Freda, and it’s grizzly hard luck that she was picked out and I wasn’t.  Rank favoritism, I call it!”

“Poor old Eve!  Look here, I’ll tell you a secret.  You head the reserve list.  I know because I saw it.  If anybody has a cold on the day of the event, you’ll take her place.”

“You mascot!  Shall I?  Oh!  I do hope somebody’ll catch cold—­not badly, but just enough to make it unsafe to go into the water.  You can’t think how I want to try my luck.  I don’t suppose I’ve a chance of a prize, but if I did get one, why I’d cock-a-doodle-do the school down!”

“I’m quite sure you would!  Trust you to blow your own trumpet!”

“Winona Woodward, if you’d been properly and thoroughly spanked in your babyhood, you’d be a much more civil person now.  I decline your company.  Ta-ta!”

“Poor old Eve!  Take it sporting!” said Winona soothingly.

On the afternoon of the great event, the ladies’ large bath was specially reserved for the school.  A goodly crowd of spectators filled almost to overflowing the galleries that ran round the hall; interested fathers and mothers, sympathetic aunts, and a sprinkling of cousins and friends made up the visitors’ list, and the rest of the space was crammed with school girls.  Each likely champion had her own set of supporters, who murmured her name as a kind of war