These stiffly starched skirts, layer on layer, first brought romance into Charlotte Thrift's life. She was thirteen, a rather stocky little girl, not too obedient of the prim maternal voice that was forever bidding her point her toes out, hold her shoulders back and not talk at table. She must surely have talked at table this morning, or, perhaps, slouched her shoulders and perversely toed in once safely out of sight of the house, because she was late for school. The horrid realization of this came as Charlotte reached the Rush Street ferry--a crude ramshackle affair drawn from one side of the river to the other with ropes pulled by hand. Charlotte attended Miss Rapp's school on the North Side though the Thrifts lived South. This makeshift craft was about to leave the south shore as Charlotte, her tardiness heavy upon her, sighted the river. With a little cry and a rush she sped down the path, leaped, slipped, and landed just short of the ferry in the slimy waters of the Chicago River. Landed exactly expresses it. Though, on second thought, perhaps settled is better. Layer on layer of stiffly starched skirts sustained her. She had fallen feet downward. There she rested on the water, her skirts spread petal-like about her, her toes, in their cross-strapped slippers, no doubt pointing demurely downward. She looked like some weird white river-lily afloat on its pad in the turbid stream. Her eyes were round with fright beneath the strongly marked black brows. Then, suddenly and quite naturally, she screamed, kicked wildly, and began to sink. Sank, in fact. It had all happened with incredible swiftness. The ferry men had scarcely had time to open their mouths vacuously. Charlotte's calliope screams, so ominously muffled now, wakened them into action. But before their clumsy wits and hands had seized on ropes a slim black-and-white line cleft the water, disappeared, and reappeared with the choking struggling frantic Charlotte, very unstarched now and utterly unmindful of toes, shoulders, and vocal restraint.