"'S not eddication as matters, it's munney!" she said blatantly to Lennie. "At your age y'ought t'ave somethink in th' bank."
He of course hated the sight of her after that. She had looked at him with a certain superciliousness and contempt in her conceited brown eyes, because he had no money and was supposed to be clever. He never forgave her.
But what did she care! She jerked up her sharp-toothed mouth, and sailed away. She wasn't going to be put down by any penniless snobs. The Ellises! Who were the Ellises? Yes, indeed! They thought themselves so superior. Could they draw a tharsand parnd? Pah!
She felt a particularly spiteful, almost vindictive, scorn of Jack. He was somebody, was he? Ha! What was he worth? That was the point. How much munney did he reckon he'd got? "If yer want me ter think anythink of yer, yer mun show me yer bank-book," she said.
Easu listened and grinned, and said nothing to all this. But she had a fiery temper of her own, and they went for one another like two devils. She wasn't going to be daunted, she wasn't. She had her virtues too. She had no method, but she was clean. The place was forever in a muddle, but she was always cleaning it, almost vindictively, as if the shine on the door-knob reflected some of the tharsand parnd. Even the baby was turned out and viciously cleaned once a day. But in the intervals it groped where it would. As for herself, she was a sight this morning, with her hair in huge iron waving-pins, and her forehead and her teeth both sticking out. She looked a sight to shudder at. But wait. Wait till she was dressed up and turning out in the buggy, in a coat and skirt of thick brown cord silk with orange and black braiding, and a hugely feathered hat, with huge floating ostrich feathers, an orange one and a brown one. And her teeth sticking out and a huge brooch of a lump of gold set with pearls and diamonds, and a great gold chain. And the baby, in a silk cape with pink ribbons, and a frilled silk bonnet of alternate pink and white ruches, mercilessly held against her chains and brooches! Wait!
Therefore when Jack glanced at her from a strange distance, she tossed her bald forehead with the curling-irons, and thought to herself: "You can look, Master Jack Nobody. And you can look again, next Sunday, when I've got my proper things on. Then you'll see who's got the munney!"
She seemed to think that her Sunday gorgeousness absolutely obliterated the grimness of her week of curling pins. "Six days shall thou labour in thy curling-irons." She lived in them. They kept her hair out of the way and saved her having to do it up all the time.
And it may be that Easu never really looked at her in her teeth and pins. That was not the real Sarah Ann. The real Sarah Ann swayed with ostrich feathers; brown silk, brown and orange feathers, reddish hair, brown eyes, pale skin, and a stiff, militant, vulgar bearing that wasn't going to let anybody put it over her. "They can't put me down, whoever they are!" she asserted. "I consider myself equal to the best, and perhaps a little better."
This Easu heard and saw with curious gratification. This was his Sarah Ann.
None the less, he was no fool. He saw the baffled, surprised look Jack turned upon this grisly young woman in curlers and teeth, as if he could not quite enter her in the class of human beings. And Easu was enough of an Ellis to know what that look meant. It was a silent "Good God!" And no man, when his wife enters the room, cares to hear another man's horrified ejaculation: "Good God!" at the sight of her.