“Ow! ow!” wailed Helen, who could bear a scratch better than dirt, or a stain. She instinctively put up her hands to her face, to rub it dry, and, of course, her hands were all streaked, also.
“There, Zaidie!” she half sobbed, “you have painted my face, too, ‘n’ I’m afraid it won’t come off, and I’ll have to go round looking like a little nigger-girl!”
At this tragic picture, Zaidie looked frightened, and instantly applied her wee handkerchief, with dire results to the handkerchief, and no good effect on the face.
“See how her looks!” cried Kenneth, gleefully, with his hands deep in his small trousers’ pockets.
Helen wailed. There were large tracts of shoe-polish on her pearly skin, and her tears chased little furrows along them. Zaidie scrubbed harder and harder with her handkerchief, but she began to grow rather frightened at the results of her painting.
“It doesn’t come off very well,” she admitted at last, pausing in some dismay. “And I don’t think I like your hair painted, anyway, Helen. It looks so mixy, you know.”
Truly, poor little Helen was a spectacle. Her soft hair was plastered down in black patches on her forehead, and big drops of blacking, gathering on the end of each plastered lock, dropped down on her nose and cheeks. Of course it did not stick where the vaseline had been rubbed, so her face was well smeared with a mixture of greasiness and shoe-polish. Her white apron was well spattered, and her hands were, by this time, like a little blackamoor’s.
“Her won’t ever get white any more, I ’xpect,” said Kenneth, cheerfully. “I blacked my Noah’s Ark once, and it didn’t ever come off. Don’t you remember?”
Here the children’s feelings completely overcame them, and Zaidie and Helen set up a shriek in concert that brought Marjorie to the bathroom.
“Oh, you naughty, naughty children!” she cried, in blank despair. “How shall I ever get you clean? Shoe-polish? Oh, horrors!”