r of him, the intuitive feminine fear of the male. McTeague
could only repeat the same thing over and over again. Trina, more
and more frightened at his huge hands--the hands of the old-time
car-boy--his immense square-cut head and his enormous brute strength,
cried out: "No, no," behind the rubber dam, shaking her head violently,
holding out her hands, and shrinking down before him in the operating
chair. McTeague came nearer to her, repeating the same question. "No,
no," she cried, terrified. Then, as she exclaimed, "Oh, I am sick,"
was suddenly taken with a fit of vomiting. It was the not unusual
after effect of the ether, aided now by her excitement and nervousness.
McTeague was checked. He poured some bromide of potassium into a
graduated glass and held it to her lips.

"Here, swallow this," he said.

CHAPTER 3

Once every two months Maria Macapa set the entire flat in commotion.
She roamed the building from garret to cellar, searching each corner,
ferreting through every old box and trunk and barrel, groping about
on the top shelves of closets, peering into rag-bags, exasperating the
lodgers with her persistence and importunity. She was collecting
junks, bits of iron, stone jugs, glass bottles, old sacks, and cast-off
garments. It was one of her perquisites. She sold the junk to Zerkow,
the rags-bottles-sacks man, who lived in a filthy den in the alley just
back of the flat, and who sometimes paid her as much as three cents
a pound. The stone jugs, however, were worth a nickel. The money that
Zerkow paid her, Maria spent on shirt waists and dotted blue neckties,
trying to dress like the girls who tended the soda-water fountain in the
candy store on the corner. She was sick with envy of these young women.
They were in the world, they were elegant, they were debonair, they had
their "young men."

On this occasion she presented herself at the door of Old Grannis's room
late in the afternoon. His door stood a little open. That of Miss Baker
was ajar a few inches. The two old people were "keeping company" after
their fashion.

"Got any junk, Mister Grannis?" inquired Maria, standing in the door, a
very dirty, half-filled pillowcase over one arm.

"No, nothing--nothing that I can think of, Maria," replied Old Grannis,
terribly vexed at the interruption, yet not wishing to be unkind.
"Nothing I think of. Yet, however--perhaps--if you wish to look."

He sat in the middle of the room before a small pine table