.

He went through the suite, by the sitting-room, where the sun was
pouring in through the looped backed Nottingham curtains upon the clean
white matting and the varnished surface of the melodeon, passed on
through the bedroom, with its framed lithographs of round-cheeked
English babies and alert fox terriers, and came out into the brick-paved
kitchen. The kitchen was clean as a new whistle; the freshly blackened
cook stove glowed like a negro's hide; the tins and porcelain-lined
stew-pans might have been of silver and of ivory. Trina was in the
centre of the room, wiping off, with a damp sponge, the oilcloth
table-cover, on which they had breakfasted. Never had she looked so
pretty. Early though it was, her enormous tiara of swarthy hair was
neatly combed and coiled, not a pin was so much as loose. She wore a
blue calico skirt with a white figure, and a belt of imitation alligator
skin clasped around her small, firmly-corseted waist; her shirt
waist was of pink linen, so new and crisp that it crackled with every
movement, while around the collar, tied in a neat knot, was one of
McTeague's lawn ties which she had appropriated. Her sleeves were
carefully rolled up almost to her shoulders, and nothing could have been
more delicious than the sight of her small round arms, white as milk,
moving back and forth as she sponged the table-cover, a faint touch of
pink coming and going at the elbows as they bent and straightened. She
looked up quickly as her husband entered, her narrow eyes alight, her
adorable little chin in the air; her lips rounded and opened with the
last words of her song, so that one could catch a glint of gold in the
fillings of her upper teeth.

The whole scene--the clean kitchen and its clean brick floor; the smell
of coffee that lingered in the air; Trina herself, fresh as if from
a bath, and singing at her work; the morning sun, striking obliquely
through the white muslin half-curtain of the window and spanning the
little kitchen with a bridge of golden mist--gave off, as it were, a
note of gayety that was not to be resisted. Through the opened top of
the window came the noises of Polk Street, already long awake. One heard
the chanting of street cries, the shrill calling of children on their
way to school, the merry rattle of a butcher's cart, the brisk noise
of hammering, or the occasional prolonged roll of a cable car trundling
heavily past, with a vibrant whirring of its jostled glass and the
joyo