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.

CHAPTER 3