McTeague had been making fillings when this letter arrived.  He was in his “Parlors,” pottering over his movable rack underneath the bird cage in the bay window.  He was making “blocks” to be used in large proximal cavities and “cylinders” for commencing fillings.  He heard the postman’s step in the hall and saw the envelopes begin to shuttle themselves through the slit of his letter-drop.  Then came the fat oblong envelope, with its official seal, that dropped flatwise to the floor with a sodden, dull impact.

The dentist put down the broach and scissors and gathered up his mail.  There were four letters altogether.  One was for Trina, in Selina’s “elegant” handwriting; another was an advertisement of a new kind of operating chair for dentists; the third was a card from a milliner on the next block, announcing an opening; and the fourth, contained in the fat oblong envelope, was a printed form with blanks left for names and dates, and addressed to McTeague, from an office in the City Hall.  McTeague read it through laboriously.  “I don’ know, I don’ know,” he muttered, looking stupidly at the rifle manufacturer’s calendar.  Then he heard Trina, from the kitchen, singing as she made a clattering noise with the breakfast dishes.  “I guess I’ll ask Trina about it,” he muttered.

He went through the suite, by the sitting-room, where the sun was pouring in through the looped backed Nottingham curtains upon the clean white matting and the varnished surface of the melodeon, passed on through the bedroom, with its framed lithographs of round-cheeked English babies and alert fox terriers, and came out into the brick-paved kitchen.  The kitchen was clean as a new whistle; the freshly blackened cook stove glowed like a negro’s hide; the tins and porcelain-lined stew-pans might have been of silver and of ivory.  Trina was in the centre of the room, wiping off, with a damp sponge, the oilcloth table-cover, on which they had breakfasted.  Never had she looked so pretty.  Early though it was, her enormous tiara of swarthy hair was neatly combed and coiled, not a pin was so much as loose.  She wore a blue calico skirt with a white figure, and a belt of imitation alligator skin clasped around her small, firmly-corseted waist; her shirt waist was of pink linen, so new and crisp that it crackled with every movement, while around the collar, tied in a neat knot, was one of McTeague’s lawn ties which she had appropriated.  Her sleeves were carefully rolled up almost to her shoulders, and nothing could have been more delicious than the sight of her small round arms, white as milk, moving back and forth as she sponged the table-cover, a faint touch of pink coming and going at the elbows as they bent and straightened.  She looked up quickly as her husband entered, her narrow eyes alight, her adorable little chin in the air; her lips rounded and opened with the last words of her song, so that one could catch a glint of gold in the fillings of her upper teeth.