They knew that Easu was married, but they were hardly prepared for the dirty baby crawling on the verandah floor. Easu had seen them come through the gate, and was striding across to meet them, after bawling something in his bullying way to someone inside the house: presumably his wife.
Outwardly, he was not much altered. Yet there was an undefinable change for the worse. He was one of those men whom marriage seems to humiliate, and to make ugly. As if he despised himself for being married.
Easu ignored the baby as if it were not there, striding past into the house, leading the newcomers into the parlour. It was darkened in there, to keep out the flies; but he pulled up the blind: "t'see their blanky fisogs." And he called out to the missus to bring glasses.
The parlour was like most parlours. Enlarged photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Ellis, the Red parents, in large pine frames, on the wall. A handsome china clock under a glass case on the mantelpiece, with flanking vases to match, on fawn-and-red woollen crochet mats. An oval, rather curvy table in the middle of the room, with the family Bible, and the meat under a fly-proof wire cover. The parlour was the coolest place for the meat.
Easu shifted the red obnoxity, wire cover and all, to the top of a cupboard where some cups and saucers were displayed, and drew forth a demijohn of spirit from the back of the horse-hair sofa, in front of the window.
Mrs. Easu came in with the glasses. She was a thin, pale-faced young woman with big dark eyes and her hair in huge curling pins, and a hostile bearing. She took no notice of the visitors: only let her big what-do-you-want eye pass over them with distaste beneath her bald forehead. It was her fixed belief that whoever came to the house came to get something, if they could. And they were not going to get it out of her. She made an alliance with Easu so far. But her rather protruding teeth and her vindictive mouth showed that Easu would get as many bites as kisses.
She set the glasses from her hands on to the table, and looked down at Easu under her pale lashes.
"What else d'ye want?" she asked rudely.
"Nothing. If I want anything I'll holloa."
They seemed to be on terms of mutual rudeness. She had been quite an heiress: brought Easu a thousand pounds. But the way she said it—a tharsand parnds!—as if it was something absolutely you couldn't get beyond, made even Easu writhe. She was common, to put it commonly. She spoke in a common way, she thought in a common way, and she acted in a common way. But she had energy, and even a vulgar suffisance. She thought herself as good as anybody, and a bit better, on the strength of the tharsand parnds!