“Whatever ails you, child?” she said at length. “What made him change his mind?”
“He said as how I was the wrong one,” murmured Lilac under her closed hands.
“The wrong one!” repeated her mother. “Why, how could he go to say such a thing? You told him you was Lilac White, I s’pose. There’s ne’er another in the village.”
“He didn’t seem as if he knew me,” said Lilac. “He looked at me very sharp, and said as how it was no good to paint me now.”
“Why ever not? You’re just the same as you was.”
“I ain’t,” said Lilac desperately, taking away her hands from her face and letting them fan at her side. “I ain’t the same. I’ve cut my hair!”
It was over now. She stood before her mother a disgraced and miserable Lilac. The black fringe of hair across her forehead, the bonnet pushed back, the small white face quivering nervously.
But though she knew it would displease her mother, she had very little idea that she had done the thing of all others most hateful to her. A fringe was to Mrs White a sort of distinguishing mark of the Greenways family, and of others like it. Not only was it ugly and unsuitable in itself, but it was an outward sign of all manner of unworthy qualities within. Girls who wore fringes were in her eyes stamped with three certain faults: untidiness, vanity, and love of dressing beyond their station. Beginning with these, who could tell to what other evils a fringe might lead? And now, her own child, her Lilac whom she had been so proud of, and thought so different from others, stood before her with this abomination on her brow. Bitterest of all, it was the influence of the Greenways that had triumphed, and not her own. All her care and toil had ended in this. It had all been in vain. If Lilac “took pattern” by her cousins in one way she would in another—“a straw can tell which way the wind blows.” She would grow up like Bella and Agnetta.
Swiftly all this rushed into Mrs White’s mind, as she stood looking with surprise and horror at Lilac’s altered face. Finding her voice as she arrived at the last conclusion, she asked coldly:
“What made yer do it?”