McTeague turned his back on her.
“Tell me, Mac, please, did you?”
The dentist jumped up and thrust his face close to hers, his heavy jaw protruding, his little eyes twinkling meanly.
“No,” he shouted. “No, no, NO. Do you hear? NO.”
Trina cowered before him. Then suddenly she began to sob aloud, weeping partly at his strange brutality, partly at the disappointment of his failure to find employment.
McTeague cast a contemptuous glance about him, a glance that embraced the dingy, cheerless room, the rain streaming down the panes of the one window, and the figure of his weeping wife.
“Oh, ain't this all FINE?” he exclaimed. “Ain't it lovely?”
“It's not my fault,” sobbed Trina.
“It is too,” vociferated McTeague. “It is too. We could live like Christians and decent people if you wanted to. You got more'n five thousand dollars, and you're so damned stingy that you'd rather live in a rat hole—and make me live there too—before you'd part with a nickel of it. I tell you I'm sick and tired of the whole business.”
An allusion to her lottery money never failed to rouse Trina.