r money
with an intensity that she could hardly express. She would plunge her
small fingers into the pile with little murmurs of affection, her long,
narrow eyes half closed and shining, her breath coming in long sighs.

"Ah, the dear money, the dear money," she would whisper. "I love you so!
All mine, every penny of it. No one shall ever, ever get you. How I've
worked for you! How I've slaved and saved for you! And I'm going to get
more; I'm going to get more, more, more; a little every day."

She was still looking for cheaper quarters. Whenever she could spare a
moment from her work, she would put on her hat and range up and down the
entire neighborhood from Sutter to Sacramento Streets, going into
all the alleys and bystreets, her head in the air, looking for the
"Rooms-to-let" sign. But she was in despair. All the cheaper tenements
were occupied. She could find no room more reasonable than the one she
and the dentist now occupied.

As time went on, McTeague's idleness became habitual. He drank no more
whiskey than at first, but his dislike for Trina increased with every
day of their poverty, with every day of Trina's persistent stinginess.
At times--fortunately rare he was more than ever brutal to her. He would
box her ears or hit her a great blow with the back of a hair-brush,
or even with his closed fist. His old-time affection for his "little
woman," unable to stand the test of privation, had lapsed by degrees,
and what little of it was left was changed, distorted, and made
monstrous by the alcohol.

The people about the house and the clerks at the provision stores often
remarked that Trina's fingertips were swollen and the nails purple as
though they had been shut in a door. Indeed, this was the explanation
she gave. The fact of the matter was that McTeague, when he had been
drinking, used to bite them, crunching and grinding them with his
immense teeth, always ingenious enough to remember which were the
sorest. Sometimes he extorted money from her by this means, but as often
as not he did it for his own satisfaction.

And in some strange, inexplicable way this brutality made Trina all
the more affectionate; aroused in her a morbid, unwholesome love of
submission, a strange, unnatural pleasure in yielding, in surrendering
herself to the will of an irresistible, virile power.

Trina's emotions had narrowed with the narrowing of her daily life. They
reduced themselves at last to but two, her passion for her