Trina allowed him a fresh pair on Sundays only.  At first these deprivations angered McTeague.  Then, all of a sudden, he slipped back into the old habits (that had been his before he knew Trina) with an ease that was surprising.  Sundays he dined at the car conductors’ coffee-joint once more, and spent the afternoon lying full length upon the bed, crop-full, stupid, warm, smoking his huge pipe, drinking his steam beer, and playing his six mournful tunes upon his concertina, dozing off to sleep towards four o’clock.

The sale of their furniture had, after paying the rent and outstanding bills, netted about a hundred and thirty dollars.  Trina believed that the auctioneer from the second-hand store had swindled and cheated them and had made a great outcry to no effect.  But she had arranged the affair with the auctioneer herself, and offset her disappointment in the matter of the sale by deceiving her husband as to the real amount of the returns.  It was easy to lie to McTeague, who took everything for granted; and since the occasion of her trickery with the money that was to have been sent to her mother, Trina had found falsehood easier than ever.

“Seventy dollars is all the auctioneer gave me,” she told her husband; “and after paying the balance due on the rent, and the grocer’s bill, there’s only fifty left.”

“Only fifty?” murmured McTeague, wagging his head, “only fifty?  Think of that.”

“Only fifty,” declared Trina.  Afterwards she said to herself with a certain admiration for her cleverness: 

“Couldn’t save sixty dollars much easier than that,” and she had added the hundred and thirty to the little hoard in the chamois-skin bag and brass match-box in the bottom of her trunk.

In these first months of their misfortunes the routine of the McTeagues was as follows:  They rose at seven and breakfasted in their room, Trina cooking the very meagre meal on an oil stove.  Immediately after breakfast Trina sat down to her work of whittling the Noah’s ark animals, and McTeague took himself off to walk down town.  He had by the greatest good luck secured a position with a manufacturer of surgical instruments, where his manual dexterity in the making of excavators, pluggers, and other dental contrivances stood him in fairly good stead.  He lunched at a sailor’s boarding-house near the water front, and in the afternoon worked till six.  He was home at six-thirty, and he and Trina had supper together in the “ladies’ dining parlor,” an adjunct of the car conductors’ coffee-joint.  Trina, meanwhile, had worked at her whittling all day long, with but half an hour’s interval for lunch, which she herself prepared upon the oil stove.  In the evening they were both so tired that they were in no mood for conversation, and went to bed early, worn out, harried, nervous, and cross.