le sex, an entire new humanity, strange and
alluring, that he seemed to have discovered. How had he ignored it so
long? It was dazzling, delicious, charming beyond all words. His narrow
point of view was at once enlarged and confused, and all at once he
saw that there was something else in life besides concertinas and steam
beer. Everything had to be made over again. His whole rude idea of
life had to be changed. The male virile desire in him tardily awakened,
aroused itself, strong and brutal. It was resistless, untrained, a thing
not to be held in leash an instant.

Little by little, by gradual, almost imperceptible degrees, the thought
of Trina Sieppe occupied his mind from day to day, from hour to hour.
He found himself thinking of her constantly; at every instant he saw
her round, pale face; her narrow, milk-blue eyes; her little out-thrust
chin; her heavy, huge tiara of black hair. At night he lay awake for
hours under the thick blankets of the bed-lounge, staring upward
into the darkness, tormented with the idea of her, exasperated at the
delicate, subtle mesh in which he found himself entangled. During the
forenoons, while he went about his work, he thought of her. As he made
his plaster-of-paris moulds at the washstand in the corner behind the
screen he turned over in his mind all that had happened, all that
had been said at the previous sitting. Her little tooth that he had
extracted he kept wrapped in a bit of newspaper in his vest pocket.
Often he took it out and held it in the palm of his immense, horny hand,
seized with some strange elephantine sentiment, wagging his head at it,
heaving tremendous sighs. What a folly!

At two o'clock on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays Trina arrived and
took her place in the operating chair. While at his work McTeague was
every minute obliged to bend closely over her; his hands touched her
face, her cheeks, her adorable little chin; her lips pressed against his
fingers. She breathed warmly on his forehead and on his eyelids,
while the odor of her hair, a charming feminine perfume, sweet, heavy,
enervating, came to his nostrils, so penetrating, so delicious, that his
flesh pricked and tingled with it; a veritable sensation of faintness
passed over this huge, callous fellow, with his enormous bones and
corded muscles. He drew a short breath through his nose; his jaws
suddenly gripped together vise-like.

But this was only at times--a strange, vexing spasm, that subsided