After the wife fails to locate the cat in the rain, she comes back to her hotel room and starts complaining to her husband about her short hair. In the resulting conversation between them, both the wife and the narrator use a simile to compare her to a boy:
“Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I let my hair grow out?” she asked, looking at her profile again.
George looked up and saw the back of her neck clipped close like a boy’s.
“I like it the way it is.”
“I get so tired of it,” she said. “I get so tired of looking like a boy.”
Here, George looks at his wife’s neck “clipped close like a boy’s,” and then the wife says out loud how “tired” she is of “looking like a boy.” Given how short and sparse “The Cat in the Rain” is, it's noteworthy that this simile appears two times in close succession. This is perhaps Hemingway’s way of highlighting the wife’s ambivalence when it comes to fulfilling traditional gender norms. On the one hand, she made the choice to cut her hair short (a choice that, at the time, meant she was likely aligned with the progressive women’s rights movement) and, on the other, she doesn’t want to be seen as too masculine.
That George responds “I like it the way it is” communicates his ambivalence around gender norms as well. While his support of her short hairstyle shows that he does not expect her to prioritize feminine beauty norms, his lack of interest in engaging with her beyond this short comment shows that he does not take her concerns about her hair very seriously.
