While Lennie faces the difficulties of sharecropping life within the home with quiet determination, Sarty’s sisters deal with their lot with pure passivity. The sisters are described (from Sarty’s perspective) as large, lazy, and “bovine” or cow-like. Dressed in flouncy dresses and tacky ribbons, the girls seem out of place, if not merely irrelevant to the struggles with justice and authority that characterize Sarty’s childhood. Lennie deals with their passivity and unhelpfulness as with any other difficulty: even as their mother, she refrains from trying to mold or change them.