Trina sat up in the chair quickly, and then drew back from him, frightened and bewildered.
«Will you? Will you?» said McTeague. «Say, Miss Trina, will you?»
«What is it? What do you mean?» she cried, confusedly, her words muffled beneath the rubber.
«Will you?» repeated McTeague.
«No, no,» she exclaimed, refusing without knowing why, suddenly seized with a fear of him, the intuitive feminine fear of the male. McTeague could only repeat the same thing over and over again. Trina, more 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 candy store on the corner. She was sick with envy of these young women. They were in the world, they were elegant, they were debonair, they had their «young men.»
On this occasion she presented herself at the door of Old Grannis's room late in the afternoon. His door stood a little open. That of Miss Baker was ajar a few inches. The two old people were «keeping company» after their fashion.
«Got any junk, Mister Grannis?» inquired Maria, standing in the door, a very dirty, half-filled pillowcase over one arm.