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