ion to him. She annoyed him because she was so small,
so prettily made, so invariably correct and precise. Her avarice
incessantly harassed him. Her industry was a constant reproach to him.
She seemed to flaunt her work defiantly in his face. It was the red
flag in the eyes of the bull. One time when he had just come back from
Frenna's and had been sitting in the chair near her, silently watching
her at her work, he exclaimed all of a sudden:

"Stop working. Stop it, I tell you. Put 'em away. Put 'em all away, or
I'll pinch you."

"But why--why?" Trina protested.

The dentist cuffed her ears. "I won't have you work." He took her knife
and her paint-pots away, and made her sit idly in the window the rest of
the afternoon.

It was, however, only when his wits had been stirred with alcohol that
the dentist was brutal to his wife. At other times, say three weeks of
every month, she was merely an incumbrance to him. They often quarrelled
about Trina's money, her savings. The dentist was bent upon having at
least a part of them. What he would do with the money once he had it,
he did not precisely know. He would spend it in royal fashion, no doubt,
feasting continually, buying himself wonderful clothes. The miner's idea
of money quickly gained and lavishly squandered, persisted in his mind.
As for Trina, the more her husband stormed, the tighter she drew the
strings of the little chamois-skin bag that she hid at the bottom of her
trunk underneath her bridal dress. Her five thousand dollars invested in
Uncle Oelbermann's business was a glittering, splendid dream which came
to her almost every hour of the day as a solace and a compensation for
all her unhappiness.

At times, when she knew that McTeague was far from home, she would lock
her door, open her trunk, and pile all her little hoard on her table. By
now it was four hundred and seven dollars and fifty cents. Trina
would play with this money by the hour, piling it, and repiling it, or
gathering it all into one heap, and drawing back to the farthest corner
of the room to note the effect, her head on one side. She polished the
gold pieces with a mixture of soap and ashes until they shone, wiping
them carefully on her apron. Or, again, she would draw the heap lovingly
toward her and bury her face in it, delighted at the smell of it and the
feel of the smooth, cool metal on her cheeks. She even put the smaller
gold pieces in her mouth, and jingled them there. She loved he