to know each other's habits. Old Grannis knew that at quarter of five
precisely Miss Baker made a cup of tea over the oil stove on the stand
between the bureau and the window. Miss Baker felt instinctively the
exact moment when Old Grannis took down his little binding apparatus
from the second shelf of his clothes closet and began his favorite
occupation of binding pamphlets--pamphlets that he never read, for all
that.

In his "Parlors" McTeague began his week's work. He glanced in the glass
saucer in which he kept his sponge-gold, and noticing that he had
used up all his pellets, set about making some more. In examining Miss
Baker's teeth at the preliminary sitting he had found a cavity in one
of the incisors. Miss Baker had decided to have it filled with gold.
McTeague remembered now that it was what is called a "proximate case,"
where there is not sufficient room to fill with large pieces of gold. He
told himself that he should have to use "mats" in the filling. He made
some dozen of these "mats" from his tape of non-cohesive gold, cutting
it transversely into small pieces that could be inserted edgewise
between the teeth and consolidated by packing. After he had made his
"mats" he continued with the other kind of gold fillings, such as he
would have occasion to use during the week; "blocks" to be used in large
proximal cavities, made by folding the tape on itself a number of
times and then shaping it with the soldering pliers; "cylinders" for
commencing fillings, which he formed by rolling the tape around a needle
called a "broach," cutting it afterwards into different lengths. He
worked slowly, mechanically, turning the foil between his fingers with
the manual dexterity that one sometimes sees in stupid persons. His head
was quite empty of all thought, and he did not whistle over his work
as another man might have done. The canary made up for his silence,
trilling and chittering continually, splashing about in its morning