"What are they for, Maggie?" said Tom, feeling his curiosity awakened.
Maggie answered by seizing her front locks and cutting them straight across the middle of her forehead.
"Oh, my buttons, Maggie, you'll catch it!" exclaimed Tom; "you'd better not cut any more off."
Snip! went the great scissors again while Tom was speaking; and he could hardly help feeling it was rather good fun—Maggie looking so queer.
"Here, Tom, cut it behind for me," said Maggie, excited by her own daring, and anxious to finish the deed.
"You'll catch it, you know," said Tom, hesitating a little as he took the scissors.
"Never mind—make haste!" said Maggie, giving a little stamp with her foot. Her cheeks were quite flushed.
The black locks were so thick,—nothing could be more tempting to a lad who had already tasted the forbidden pleasure of cutting the pony's mane. One delicious grinding snip, and then another and another, and the hinder locks fell heavily on the floor. Maggie stood cropped in a jagged, uneven manner, but with a sense of clearness and freedom, as if she had emerged from a wood into the open plain.
"Oh, Maggie," said Tom, jumping round her and slapping his knees as he laughed; "oh, my buttons, what a queer thing you look! Look at yourself in the glass."
Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly of her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action. She didn't want her hair to look pretty—that was out of the question—she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl and not to find fault with her. But now, when Tom began to laugh at her, the affair had quite a new aspect. She looked in the glass, and still Tom laughed and clapped his hands, and Maggie's flushed cheeks began to pale, and her lips to tremble a little.