Dedicated to L. E. Gates of Harvard University...

It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors’ coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone...

After his breakfast the following Monday morning, McTeague looked over the appointments he had written down in the book-slate that hung against the screen. His writing was immense, very clumsy, and ve...

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...

The days passed. McTeague had finished the operation on Trina’s teeth. She did not come any more to the Parlors. Matters had readjusted themselves a little between the two during the last sittings. Tr...

Wednesday morning, Washington’s Birthday, McTeague rose very early and shaved himself. Besides the six mournful concertina airs, the dentist knew one song. Whenever he shaved, he sung this song; never...

No, Trina did not know. “Do I love him? Do I love him?” A thousand times she put the question to herself during the next two or three days. At night she hardly slept, but lay broad awake for hours in ...

“What nonsense!” answered Trina. “Ach Gott! What is ut?” cried Mrs. Sieppe, misunderstanding, supposing a calamity. “What⁠—what⁠—what,” stammered the dentist, confused by the lights, the crowded stair...

The next two months were delightful. Trina and McTeague saw each other regularly, three times a week. The dentist went over to B Street Sunday and Wednesday afternoons as usual; but on Fridays it was ...

Trina and McTeague were married on the first day of June, in the photographer’s rooms that the dentist had rented. All through May the Sieppe household had been turned upside down. The little box of a...

That summer passed, then the winter. The wet season began in the last days of September and continued all through October, November, and December. At long intervals would come a week of perfect days, ...

On that particular morning the McTeagues had risen a half hour earlier than usual and taken a hurried breakfast in the kitchen on the deal table with its oilcloth cover. Trina was housecleaning that w...

“Now, then, Maria,” said Zerkow, his cracked, strained voice just rising above a whisper, hitching his chair closer to the table, “now, then, my girl, let’s have it all over again. Tell us about the g...

One morning about a week after Marcus had left for the southern part of the State, McTeague found an oblong letter thrust through the letter-drop of the door of his Parlors. The address was typewritte...

“Well, what do you think?” said Trina. She and McTeague stood in a tiny room at the back of the flat and on its very top floor. The room was whitewashed. It contained a bed, three cane-seated chairs, ...

Then the grind began. It would have been easier for the McTeagues to have faced their misfortunes had they befallen them immediately after their marriage, when their love for each other was fresh and ...

A week passed, then a fortnight, then a month. It was a month of the greatest anxiety and unquietude for Trina. McTeague was out of a job, could find nothing to do; and Trina, who saw the impossibilit...

One day, about a fortnight after the coroner’s inquest had been held, and when the excitement of the terrible affair was calming down and Polk Street beginning to resume its monotonous routine, Old Gr...

That same night McTeague was awakened by a shrill scream, and woke to find Trina’s arms around his neck. She was trembling so that the bedsprings creaked. “Huh?” cried the dentist, sitting up in bed, ...

One can hold a scrubbing-brush with two good fingers and the stumps of two others even if both joints of the thumb are gone, but it takes considerable practice to get used to it. Trina became a scrub-...

The day was very hot, and the silence of high noon lay close and thick between the steep slopes of the canyons like an invisible, muffling fluid. At intervals the drone of an insect bored the air and ...

“Well,” said one of the deputies, as he backed the horse into the shafts of the buggy in which the pursuers had driven over from the Hill, “we’ve about as good as got him. It isn’t hard to follow a ma...

Within a month after his departure from San Francisco, Marcus had “gone in on a cattle ranch” in the Panamint Valley with an Englishman, an acquaintance of Mr. Sieppe’s. His headquarters were at a pla...