Ella of All-of-a-Kind Family Read Free Page B

comb it out. Then we’ll see.”
    They brushed and combed but some long strands of hair were still visible among shorter ones.
    “How’d you happen to miss those, Charlotte?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe her hair wasn’t parted exactly in the middle. I should have straightened it out first before I began cutting. Oh well,” Charlotte made light of the whole business, “it doesn’t really matter. All I have to do is snip off those few extra hairs and it’ll be fine.” She picked up the scissors. A snip here, a snip there, a snip everywhere. “There! That does it!”
    Gertie gulped. “Gosh, I never saw bangs zigzag all the way up to the ears before. It looks peculiar.”
    “What’s pe-culiar?” Ruthie asked.
    “Oh nothing!” snapped Charlotte. She turned on Gertie. “I like it this way. It gives her face a sort of”—she fishedabout for the right words—“a clean, open look,” she ended triumphantly.
    Anxious to have it over with, Gertie allowed herself to be persuaded. “Well, maybe, but you ought at least try to even it out. The right side is a good half inch longer than the left.”
    “Can you fix it, Charlotte?” Ruthie quavered anxiously.
    Charlotte sheared away.
    Gertie clapped her hands to her head. “Just look at what you’re doing! Now the left side’s longer!”
    The scissors slid over to the left. Snip—snip! By now the towel was overflowing with hair.
    “You’re only making it worse all the time!” wailed Gertie.
    “I am not!” Charlotte retorted, but not too confidently. She chewed on a fingernail. “Say!” she exclaimed, her eyes alight with renewed enthusiasm. “You know what would be really attractive? If I sort of graduate it around, starting very short in the front like this, and gradually leaving the hair longer as you work around toward the back.”
    “Sounds crazy to me.”
    “That’s because you have no imagination. Once you actually see it, you’ll feel different about it. It’ll give a lovely sweep to the hair.”
    “Please, Charlotte,” Gertie begged, unconvinced, “don’t cut any more.”
    But there was no staying Charlotte’s vision. Already clumps of hair were falling onto the towel as well as on the floor.
    By now the barber game was getting too much for Ruthie. “No more,” she yelled shaking her cropped head. “I don’t want you to cut my hair no more!”
    “Please, Ruthie,” Charlotte pleaded, “just a teeny bit more and I’ll be all finished.”
    Charlotte kept cutting away as best she could in between Ruthie’s wriggling protests and Gertie’s alarums. At last she gave up. “Well, that’s it,” she said, removing the towel. “I can’t do any more.”
    “I should say not,” Gertie whispered. “There’s more hair on the floor than on her head.” She groaned. “Aunt Fanny’ll have a fit. And I wouldn’t blame her one bit. Who ever saw a haircut like this?”
    “Some people have no appreciation for originality,” Charlotte countered. “Why must everybody look exactly like everybody else? I think it’s so much more interesting this way—different somehow.”
    “It’s different all right,” agreed Gertie. “All ziggity-zaggity!”
    Ruthie, who had dashed into the bedroom meanwhile for a view of herself in the dresser mirror, came running back. She planted herself before Charlotte, her face all crumpled up. “What did you do? You mur-der-er you!” she screamed, bursting into tears.
    Taken aback, Charlotte began biting her nails, not knowing what else to do. After a while, she knelt down and tried to gather the sobbing little girl to her. “Look Ruthie, I’m awfully sorry you don’t like it, but honest, it’s not bad at all.”
    Ruthie pulled away and sought the comfort of Gertie’s shoulder. Tears streamed down her face. “You’re just saying that,” she cried. “You know yourself, it’s horrible—horrible. Even Gertie thinks so.”
    Gertie didn’t respond. She could only look reproachfully at Charlotte as she