Trina was not quite so scrupulously tidy now as in the old days.  At one time while whittling the Noah’s ark animals she had worn gloves.  She never wore them now.  She still took pride in neatly combing and coiling her wonderful black hair, but as the days passed she found it more and more comfortable to work in her blue flannel wrapper.  Whittlings and chips accumulated under the window where she did her work, and she was at no great pains to clear the air of the room vitiated by the fumes of the oil stove and heavy with the smell of cooking.  It was not gay, that life.  The room itself was not gay.  The huge double bed sprawled over nearly a fourth of the available space; the angles of Trina’s trunk and the washstand projected into the room from the walls, and barked shins and scraped elbows.  Streaks and spots of the “non-poisonous” paint that Trina used were upon the walls and wood-work.  However, in one corner of the room, next the window, monstrous, distorted, brilliant, shining with a light of its own, stood the dentist’s sign, the enormous golden tooth, the tooth of a Brobdingnag.

One afternoon in September, about four months after the McTeagues had left their suite, Trina was at her work by the window.  She had whittled some half-dozen sets of animals, and was now busy painting them and making the arks.  Little pots of “non-poisonous” paint stood at her elbow on the table, together with a box of labels that read, “Made in France.”  Her huge clasp-knife was stuck into the under side of the table.  She was now occupied solely with the brushes and the glue pot.  She turned the little figures in her fingers with a wonderful lightness and deftness, painting the chickens Naples yellow, the elephants blue gray, the horses Vandyke brown, adding a dot of Chinese white for the eyes and sticking in the ears and tail with a drop of glue.  The animals once done, she put together and painted the arks, some dozen of them, all windows and no doors, each one opening only by a lid which was half the roof.  She had all the work she could handle these days, for, from this time till a week before Christmas, Uncle Oelbermann could take as many “Noah’s ark sets” as she could make.

Suddenly Trina paused in her work, looking expectantly toward the door.  McTeague came in.

“Why, Mac,” exclaimed Trina.  “It’s only three o’clock.  What are you home so early for?  Have they discharged you?”

“They’ve fired me,” said McTeague, sitting down on the bed.

“Fired you!  What for?”

“I don’ know.  Said the times were getting hard an’ they had to let me go.”

Trina let her paint-stained hands fall into her lap.

“Oh!” she cried.  “If we don’t have the hardest luck of any two people I ever heard of.  What can you do now?  Is there another place like that where they make surgical instruments?”

“Huh?  No, I don’ know.  There’s three more.”

“Well, you must try them right away.  Go down there right now.”