a lottery ticket. From
that moment her passion for hoarding money becomes the dominant
theme of the story, takes command of the book and its characters.
After their marriage the dentist is disbarred from practice. They
move into a garret where she starves her husband and herself to save
that precious hoard. She sells even his office furniture, everything
but his concertina and his canary bird, with which he stubbornly
refuses to part and which are destined to become very important
accessories in the property room of the theatre where this drama is
played. This removal from their first home is to this story what
Gervaise's removal from her shop is to L'Assommoir; it is the fatal
episode of the third act, the sacrifice of self-respect, the
beginning of the end. From that time the money stands between
"Trina" and her husband. Outraged and humiliated, hating her for her
meanness, demoralized by his idleness and despair, he begins to
abuse her. The story becomes a careful and painful study of the
disintegration of this union, a penetrating and searching analysis
of the degeneration of these two souls, the woman's corroded by
greed, the man's poisoned by disappointment and hate.

And all the while this same painful theme is placed in a lower key.
Maria, the housemaid who took care of "McTeague's" dental parlors in
his better days, was a half-crazy girl from somewhere in Central
America, she herself did not remember just where. But she had a
wonderful story about her people owning a dinner service of pure
gold with a punch bowl you could scarcely lift, which rang like a
church bell when you struck it. On the strength of this story
"Zercow," the Jew junk man, marries her, and believing that she
knows where this treasure is hidden, bullies and tortures her to
force her to disclose her secret. At last "Maria" is found with her
throat cut, and "Zercow" is picked up by the wharf with a sack full
of rusty tin cans, which in his dementia he must have thought the
fabled dinner service of gold.

From this it is a short step to "McTeague's" crime. He kills his
wife to get possession of her money, and escapes to the mountains.
While he is on his way south, pushing toward Mexico, he is overtaken
by his murdered wife's cousin and former suitor. Both men are half
mad with thirst, and there in the desert wastes of Death's Valley,
they spring to their last conflict. The cousin falls, but before he
dies he slips a handcuff over "McTeague's"