Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him
ran the foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer.
The vices and sins of his father and of his father’s
father, to the third and fourth and five hundredth
generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire
race flowed in his veins. Why should it be?
He did not desire it. Was he to blame?
But McTeague could not understand this thing.
It had faced him, as sooner or later it faces every
child of man; but its significance was not for him.
To reason with it was beyond him. He could only
oppose to it an instinctive stubborn resistance, blind,
inert.
McTeague went on with his work. As he was rapping
in the little blocks and cylinders with the mallet,
Trina slowly came back to herself with a long sigh.
She still felt a little confused, and lay quiet in
the chair. There was a long silence, broken only
by the uneven tapping of the hardwood mallet.
By and by she said, “I never felt a thing,”
and then she smiled at him very prettily beneath the
rubber dam. McTeague turned to her suddenly,
his mallet in one hand, his pliers holding a pellet
of sponge-gold in the other. All at once he said,
with the unreasoned simplicity and directness of a
child: “Listen here, Miss Trina, I like
you better than any one else; what’s the matter
with us getting married?”
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.
