But McTeague never became a drunkard in the generally received sense of the term.  He did not drink to excess more than two or three times in a month, and never upon any occasion did he become maudlin or staggering.  Perhaps his nerves were naturally too dull to admit of any excitation; perhaps he did not really care for the whiskey, and only drank because Heise and the other men at Frenna’s did.  Trina could often reproach him with drinking too much; she never could say that he was drunk.  The alcohol had its effect for all that.  It roused the man, or rather the brute in the man, and now not only roused it, but goaded it to evil.  McTeague’s nature changed.  It was not only the alcohol, it was idleness and a general throwing off of the good influence his wife had had over him in the days of their prosperity.  McTeague disliked Trina.  She was a perpetual irritation to him.  She annoyed him because she was so small, so prettily made, so invariably correct and precise.  Her avarice incessantly harassed him.  Her industry was a constant reproach to him.  She seemed to flaunt her work defiantly in his face.  It was the red flag in the eyes of the bull.  One time when he had just come back from Frenna’s and had been sitting in the chair near her, silently watching her at her work, he exclaimed all of a sudden: 

“Stop working.  Stop it, I tell you.  Put ’em away.  Put ’em all away, or I’ll pinch you.”

“But why—­why?” Trina protested.

The dentist cuffed her ears.  “I won’t have you work.”  He took her knife and her paint-pots away, and made her sit idly in the window the rest of the afternoon.

It was, however, only when his wits had been stirred with alcohol that the dentist was brutal to his wife.  At other times, say three weeks of every month, she was merely an incumbrance to him.  They often quarrelled about Trina’s money, her savings.  The dentist was bent upon having at least a part of them.  What he would do with the money once he had it, he did not precisely know.  He would spend it in royal fashion, no doubt, feasting continually, buying himself wonderful clothes.  The miner’s idea of money quickly gained and lavishly squandered, persisted in his mind.  As for Trina, the more her husband stormed, the tighter she drew the strings of the little chamois-skin bag that she hid at the bottom of her trunk underneath her bridal dress.  Her five thousand dollars invested in Uncle Oelbermann’s business was a glittering, splendid dream which came to her almost every hour of the day as a solace and a compensation for all her unhappiness.