`You'll catch it, you know,' said Tom, nodding his head in an admonitory manner, and 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. I speak to those who know the satisfaction of making a pair of shears meet through a duly resisting mass of hair. One delicious grinding snip, and then another and another, and the hinder locks fell heavily on the floor, and 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.
`O Maggie,' said Tom, jumping round her and slapping his knees as he laughed, `O, my buttons, what a queer thing you look! Look at yourself in the glass - you look like the idiot we throw our nutshells to at school.'
Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought before-hand 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 and say she was like the idiot, 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.
`O Maggie, you'll have to go down to dinner directly,' said Tom. `O my!'
`Don't laugh at me, Tom,' said Maggie, in a passionate tone, with an outburst of angry tears, stamping and giving him a push.
`Now then spitfire!' said Tom. `What did you cut it off for then? I shall go down: I can smell the dinner going in.'
He hurried down-stairs and left poor Maggie to that bitter sense of the irrevocable which was almost an every-day experience of her small soul. She could see clearly enough now the thing was done that it was very foolish, and that she should have to hear and think more about her hair than ever; for Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if they had not been done, with all the detail and exaggerated circumstances of an active imagination. Tom never did the same sort of foolish things as Maggie, having a wonderful, instinctive discernment of what would turn to his advantage or disadvantage, and so it happened that though he was much more wilful and inflexible than Maggie, his mother hardly ever called him naughty. But if Tom did make a mistake of that sort he espoused it and stood by it: he `didn't mind': - if he broke the lash of his father's gigwhip by lashing the gate, he couldn't help it - the whip shouldn't have got caught in the hinge. If Tom Tulliver whipped a gate he was convinced, not that the whipping of gates by all boys was a justifiable act, but that he Tom Tulliver was justifiable in whipping that particular gate, and he wasn't going to be sorry. But Maggie, as she stood crying before the glass, felt it impossible that she should go down to dinner and endure the severe eyes and severe words of her aunts, while Tom, and Lucy, and Kezia who waited at table, and perhaps her father and her uncles, would laugh at her - for if Tom had laughed at her of course every one else would: and if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy and had the apricot pudding and the custard! What could she do but sob? She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the slaughtered sheep. Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves and broken friendships, but it was not less bitter to Maggie - perhaps it was even more bitter - than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. `Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by,' is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all