bath, keeping up an incessant noise and movement that would have been
maddening to any one but McTeague, who seemed to have no nerves at all.

After he had finished his fillings, he made a hook broach from a bit of
piano wire to replace an old one that he had lost. It was time for his
dinner then, and when he returned from the car conductors' coffee-joint,
he found Miss Baker waiting for him.

The ancient little dressmaker was at all times willing to talk of Old
Grannis to anybody that would listen, quite unconscious of the gossip
of the flat. McTeague found her all a-flutter with excitement. Something
extraordinary had happened. She had found out that the wall-paper in Old
Grannis's room was the same as that in hers.

"It has led me to thinking, Doctor McTeague," she exclaimed, shaking her
little false curls at him. "You know my room is so small, anyhow, and
the wall-paper being the same--the pattern from my room continues right
into his--I declare, I believe at one time that was all one room. Think
of it, do you suppose it was? It almost amounts to our occupying the
same room. I don't know--why, really--do you think I should speak to the
landlady about it? He bound pamphlets last night until half-past nine.
They say that he's the younger son of a baronet; that there are reasons
for his not coming to the title; his stepfather wronged him cruelly."

No one had ever said such a thing. It was preposterous to imagine any
mystery connected with Old Grannis. Miss Baker had chosen to invent the
little fiction, had created the title and the unjust stepfather from
some dim memories of the novels of her girlhood.

She took her place in the operating chair. McTeague began the filling.