“Walk home with me, my dear, and we’ll ask the captain,” Mrs. Macy invited. “For my part, I shall be pleased to accept. How does thee feel about Tommy’s going? Won’t thee and Lister both miss him very much?” Quick tears blurred Erica’s eyes, but she pretended to be looking at something across Main Street, and wiped them away fiercely with the back of her hand—having, as usual, mislaid her neat white pocket handkerchief. “Yes, ma’am, we will,” she said, dully. The more she had thought about Tommy’s departure during the past three days since she had heard the news, the more utterly calamitous it seemed to her. But Erica’s code was the code drilled into her by Lis and Tommy, which insisted that tears, particularly in public, were shameful even for a girl; also that whining over what was fixed and settled was something only spoiled children did. Besides, Tommy was in the seventh heaven of delight at the prospect of his first voyage. Even delicate Aunt Callie, his mother, tightened her lips and tried to smile at his raptures, instead of dwelling on her own sense of loss. “Yes’m,” Erica repeated, “we’re going to miss him, I expect.” They turned into Center Street, and walked two blocks along it to Pearl—the latter name, changed a few years before, unfortunately, from India Street. Mrs. Macy’s house was small and neat and white, set back from the street behind a prim garden blazing with late fall dahlias, Spanish Browns, and small, hardy chrysanthemums. A tall man with iron-gray hair and a gray beard stood in the open doorway, glancing up at the clouds breaking overhead after the rain. “Judson,” Mrs. Macy greeted her brother, “thee needn’t study the sky for an hour. I can tell thee that it’s going to clear, unless the fog comes in again. Here’s Erica Folger bringing us an invitation from Miss Charity to supper tomorrow night—” She broke off with a little gasp. “La, Erica! _what_ has come of thy nice thick braids?” For without thinking what she was about, Erica had snatched off her bonnet, which had heretofore hidden her revolutionary hair-cut, and was fanning herself vigorously, swinging it by its strings. Erica hated bonnets among the many other restraining things of life that seemed to her young impatience so needless. Now, startled, her hand flew self-consciously to her head, and her smile was sheepish. “I forgot, or I wouldn’t have taken my bonnet off,” she admitted. “I cut my hair off day before yesterday. I’ve wanted to for a long while. My braids were so heavy and troublesome, and I’ve always envied Tommy and Lis being so—so free. At last I just chopped them off. Aunt Charity was like to have fainted when she saw me.” “I don’t wonder,” Mrs. Macy said, decidedly. “My dear, who ever heard tell of a girl with short hair? If it had been Mollie, I don’t know what I would have done.” Here Captain Bartlet interposed, seeing Erica’s cheeks crimsoning a deeper hue of combined anger and mortification.