Never until then had McTeague become so well acquainted with a girl of Trina’s age.  The younger women of Polk Street—­the shop girls, the young women of the soda fountains, the waitresses in the cheap restaurants—­preferred another dentist, a young fellow just graduated from the college, a poser, a rider of bicycles, a man about town, who wore astonishing waistcoats and bet money on greyhound coursing.  Trina was McTeague’s first experience.  With her the feminine element suddenly entered his little world.  It was not only her that he saw and felt, it was the woman, the whole sex, an entire new humanity, strange and alluring, that he seemed to have discovered.  How had he ignored it so long?  It was dazzling, delicious, charming beyond all words.  His narrow point of view was at once enlarged and confused, and all at once he saw that there was something else in life besides concertinas and steam beer.  Everything had to be made over again.  His whole rude idea of life had to be changed.  The male virile desire in him tardily awakened, aroused itself, strong and brutal.  It was resistless, untrained, a thing not to be held in leash an instant.

Little by little, by gradual, almost imperceptible degrees, the thought of Trina Sieppe occupied his mind from day to day, from hour to hour.  He found himself thinking of her constantly; at every instant he saw her round, pale face; her narrow, milk-blue eyes; her little out-thrust chin; her heavy, huge tiara of black hair.  At night he lay awake for hours under the thick blankets of the bed-lounge, staring upward into the darkness, tormented with the idea of her, exasperated at the delicate, subtle mesh in which he found himself entangled.  During the forenoons, while he went about his work, he thought of her.  As he made his plaster-of-paris moulds at the washstand in the corner behind the screen he turned over in his mind all that had happened, all that had been said at the previous sitting.  Her little tooth that he had extracted he kept wrapped in a bit of newspaper in his vest pocket.  Often he took it out and held it in the palm of his immense, horny hand, seized with some strange elephantine sentiment, wagging his head at it, heaving tremendous sighs.  What a folly!

At two o’clock on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays Trina arrived and took her place in the operating chair.  While at his work McTeague was every minute obliged to bend closely over her; his hands touched her face, her cheeks, her adorable little chin; her lips pressed against his fingers.  She breathed warmly on his forehead and on his eyelids, while the odor of her hair, a charming feminine perfume, sweet, heavy, enervating, came to his nostrils, so penetrating, so delicious, that his flesh pricked and tingled with it; a veritable sensation of faintness passed over this huge, callous fellow, with his enormous bones and corded muscles.  He drew a short breath through his nose; his jaws suddenly gripped together vise-like.