“If we couldn’t get Aurelia’s freckles off, we could paint some on Amelia,” suggested somebody else.
“Nobody can tell us apart except by the freckles,” Amelia assured them.
“Then of course we can do it,” cried everybody at once.
Amelia was summarily ordered to send for her twin, who was to arrive exactly two days before the meet, spending the interval in training for the jumps, and, if possible, in getting rid of her freckles. Meanwhile the team was to be taken into the secret, and Rita Carson, who was wonderful about stage make-ups, was to be instructed to try her hand at freckles. Amelia reluctantly consented to be freckled if necessary.
“Only she must use something that comes off easily,” she stipulated. “If I can’t have the fun that Aurelia does out of tearing around in the sun, why, I don’t want my complexion ruined—no, not even to win the track meet.”
With Amelia’s consent assured, Rita Carson was the incalculable element in the situation. Rita was artistic, and she had the artistic temperament strongly developed; which meant that she would make freckles wonderfully or not at all, that she could never be relied upon to keep an engagement, and that she was more likely than not to be missing on the crucial day of the track meet. But as it was a case of Rita or nobody, there was nothing to do but try to keep her interested, and hope that possibly the Paris sojourn had bleached out Aurelia.
Aurelia’s letter soon settled that: “I’ll come and do the jumps for you. All of my beauty spots (and a few more) came back on shipboard. I’d do quite a lot for you, but I draw the line at puttering any more over my face.
“P. S. They’re mostly on my forehead—small and millions of them.”
A week before the track meet Rita began freckling Amelia according to her twin’s general instruction. Various persons exclaimed over the way Amelia’s lovely white skin was getting sun-spotted. Amelia replied sweetly that skin like hers generally freckled in summer. To give color to this theory she spent her afternoons walking, canoeing, or driving without a hat, which was good Harding custom, but repugnant to poor Amelia. Another bother was having to put on a hot gym. suit in the middle of the afternoon and pretend to practice with the team, to the list of which her name had been added. Miss Andrews protested vaguely, but as she had suddenly decided to go abroad for the summer, she was too busy getting ready to take much interest in the freshman champions.
But the crowning horror of her situation Amelia found in the restrictions put upon face-washing.