“Well—well—do you mean—should I have paid for that?”
“Well, you'd 'a' had to sleep SOMEWHERES, wouldn't you?” flashed out Marcus. “You 'a' had to pay half a dollar for a bed at the flat.”
“All right, all right,” cried the dentist, hastily, feeling in his pockets. “I don't want you should be out anything on my account, old man. Here, will four bits do?”
“I don't WANT your damn money,” shouted Marcus in a sudden rage, throwing back the coin. “I ain't no beggar.”
McTeague was miserable. How had he offended his pal?
“Well, I want you should take it, Mark,” he said, pushing it towards him.
“I tell you I won't touch your money,” exclaimed the other through his clenched teeth, white with passion. “I've been played for a sucker long enough.”
“What's the matter with you lately, Mark?” remonstrated McTeague. “You've got a grouch about something. Is there anything I've done?”
“Well, that's all right, that's all right,” returned Marcus as he rose from the table. “That's all right. I've been played for a sucker long enough, that's all. I've been played for a sucker long enough.” He went away with a parting malevolent glance.
At the corner of Polk Street, between the flat and the car conductors' coffee-joint, was Frenna's. It was a corner grocery; advertisements for cheap butter and eggs, painted in green marking-ink upon wrapping paper, stood about on the sidewalk outside. The doorway was decorated with a huge Milwaukee beer sign. Back of the store proper was a bar where white sand covered the floor. A few tables and chairs were scattered here and there. The walls were hung with gorgeously-colored tobacco advertisements and colored lithographs of trotting horses. On the wall behind the bar was a model of a full-rigged ship enclosed in a bottle.