Bernice Bobs Her Hair: Part 6 Summary & Analysis

Later that day, Bernice realizes just how badly she had been tricked when her Aunt Josephine remarks, aghast, that her bobbed hair will offend Mrs. Deyo, who is holding a dance for Bernice and Marjorie before the former’s departure. Mrs. Deyo detests bobbed hair so much that she “devoted fifteen minutes” of speaking time to it, in a paper on “The Foibles of the Younger Generation” that she read before the Thursday Club. Mrs. Harvey chides Bernice, “Oh, Bernice, what’ll your mother say? She’ll think I let you do it.” The rest of the evening passes miserably. Bernice fails to style her bob, receives “faintly hostile” comments from her uncle, and fails to entertain the boys who visit her that evening.

Smugly and insincerely, Marjorie insists that the haircut looks fine—but after the girls bid each other good night, “something snapped within Bernice.” Immediately she packs her bags and plans her departure home for that very night, writing a brief letter to Mrs. Harvey to explain her reasons for going. Smoothly, with confidence, she calculates the time needed to reach the train station by walking and then taking a taxi cab.

Before Bernice leaves the house, “an expression flashed into her eyes that a practised character reader might have connected vaguely with the set look she had worn in the barber’s chair—somehow a development of it.” With set determination, she stealthily enters Marjorie’s bedroom. Making no sound, taking care not to wake Marjorie by her touch, she snips off her cousin’s pigtails with scissors, ruining her hair just as her own was ruined. Feeling “oddly happy and exuberant,” Bernice steps off the porch and leaves for home—and as she passes Warren McIntyre’s house, she tosses Marjorie’s braids onto his porch. “Scalp the selfish thing!” she giggles, as she “set[s] off at a half-run down the moonlit street.”