“I can still save a little,” she said to herself, after the room had been engaged; “perhaps almost as much as ever.  I’ll have three hundred dollars pretty soon, and Mac thinks it’s only two hundred.  It’s almost two hundred and fifty; and I’ll get a good deal out of the sale.”

But this sale was a long agony.  It lasted a week.  Everything went—­everything but the few big pieces that went with the suite, and that belonged to the photographer.  The melodeon, the chairs, the black walnut table before which they were married, the extension table in the sitting-room, the kitchen table with its oilcloth cover, the framed lithographs from the English illustrated papers, the very carpets on the floors.  But Trina’s heart nearly broke when the kitchen utensils and furnishings began to go.  Every pot, every stewpan, every knife and fork, was an old friend.  How she had worked over them!  How clean she had kept them!  What a pleasure it had been to invade that little brick-paved kitchen every morning, and to wash up and put to rights after breakfast, turning on the hot water at the sink, raking down the ashes in the cook-stove, going and coming over the warm bricks, her head in the air, singing at her work, proud in the sense of her proprietorship and her independence!  How happy had she been the day after her marriage when she had first entered that kitchen and knew that it was all her own!  And how well she remembered her raids upon the bargain counters in the house-furnishing departments of the great down-town stores!  And now it was all to go.  Some one else would have it all, while she was relegated to cheap restaurants and meals cooked by hired servants.  Night after night she sobbed herself to sleep at the thought of her past happiness and her present wretchedness.  However, she was not alone in her unhappiness.

“Anyhow, I’m going to keep the steel engraving an’ the stone pug dog,” declared the dentist, his fist clenching.  When it had come to the sale of his office effects McTeague had rebelled with the instinctive obstinacy of a boy, shutting his eyes and ears.  Only little by little did Trina induce him to part with his office furniture.  He fought over every article, over the little iron stove, the bed-lounge, the marble-topped centre table, the whatnot in the corner, the bound volumes of “Allen’s Practical Dentist,” the rifle manufacturer’s calendar, and the prim, military chairs.  A veritable scene took place between him and his wife before he could bring himself to part with the steel engraving of “Lorenzo de’ Medici and His Court” and the stone pug dog with its goggle eyes.

“Why,” he would cry, “I’ve had ’em ever since—­ever since I began; long before I knew you, Trina.  That steel engraving I bought in Sacramento one day when it was raining.  I saw it in the window of a second-hand store, and a fellow gave me that stone pug dog.  He was a druggist.  It was in Sacramento too.  We traded.  I gave him a shaving-mug and a razor, and he gave me the pug dog.”