"Like it! I hate it. I hate any sort of work. What fun do you suppose there is in teaching endless stupid children, and stuffing in classrooms all day, and correcting exercises and preparing sewing all night? Of course, they can't help being stupid. It's that that's so amazing. You can't help being kind to them--they're so stupid."
"If ye didn't do that, what should ye do?" James inquired.
"I shouldn't do anything unless I was forced," said she. "I don't want to do anything, except enjoy myself--read, play the piano, pay visits, and have plenty of _really_ nice clothes. Why should I want to do anything? I can tell you this--if I didn't need the money I'd never go inside that school again, or any other!"
"Dun ye mean to say," he asked, with an ineffable intonation, "that Susan and that there young farmer have gone gadding off to Canada and left you all alone with nothing?"
"Of course they haven't," said Helen. "Why, mother is the most generous old thing you can possibly imagine. She's left all her own income to me."
"Well, it comes to rather over thirty shillings a week."
"And can't a single woman live on thirty shillings a _wik_? Bless us! I don't spend thirty shillings a wik myself."
Helen raised her chin. "A single woman can live on thirty shillings a week," she said. "But what about her frocks?"
"Well, what about her frocks?" he repeated.
"Well," she said, "I like frocks. It just happens that I can't do without frocks. It's just frocks that I work for; I spend nearly all I earn on them." And her eyes, descending, seemed to say: "Look at the present example."
"Seventy pounds a year on ye clothes! Ye're not serious, lass?"
She looked at him coldly. "I am serious," she said.
Experienced as he was, he had never come across a fact so incredible as this fact. And the compulsion of believing it occupied his forces to such an extent that he had no force left to be wise. He did not observe the icy, darting challenge in her eye, and he ignored the danger in her voice.
"All as I can say is you ought to be ashamed o' yourself, lass!" he said, sharply. The reflection was blown out of him by the expansion of his feelings. Seventy pounds a year on clothes!... He too was serious.
Now, James Ollerenshaw was not the first person whom Helen's passion for clothes had driven into indiscretions. Her mother, for example, had done battle with that passion, and had been defeated with heavy loss. A head-mistress and a chairman of a School Board (a pompous coward) had also suffered severely. And though Helen had been the victor, she had not won without some injury to her nerves. Her campaigns and conquests had left her, on this matter, "touchy"--as the word is used in the Five Towns.