Little by little her sorrow over the loss of her precious savings overcame the grief of McTeague’s desertion of her.  Her avarice had grown to be her one dominant passion; her love of money for the money’s sake brooded in her heart, driving out by degrees every other natural affection.  She grew thin and meagre; her flesh clove tight to her small skeleton; her small pale mouth and little uplifted chin grew to have a certain feline eagerness of expression; her long, narrow eyes glistened continually, as if they caught and held the glint of metal.  One day as she sat in her room, the empty brass match-box and the limp chamois bag in her hands, she suddenly exclaimed: 

“I could have forgiven him if he had only gone away and left me my money.  I could have—­yes, I could have forgiven him even this”—­she looked at the stumps of her fingers.  “But now,” her teeth closed tight and her eyes flashed,

“now—­I’ll—­never—&
shy;forgive—­him—­as-long—­as—­I—­live.”

The empty bag and the hollow, light match-box troubled her.  Day after day she took them from her trunk and wept over them as other women weep over a dead baby’s shoe.  Her four hundred dollars were gone, were gone, were gone.  She would never see them again.  She could plainly see her husband spending her savings by handfuls; squandering her beautiful gold pieces that she had been at such pains to polish with soap and ashes.  The thought filled her with an unspeakable anguish.  She would wake at night from a dream of McTeague revelling down her money, and ask of the darkness, “How much did he spend to-day?  How many of the gold pieces are left?  Has he broken either of the two twenty-dollar pieces yet?  What did he spend it for?”

The instant she was out of the hospital Trina had begun to save again, but now it was with an eagerness that amounted at times to a veritable frenzy.  She even denied herself lights and fuel in order to put by a quarter or so, grudging every penny she was obliged to spend.  She did her own washing and cooking.  Finally she sold her wedding dress, that had hitherto lain in the bottom of her trunk.

The day she moved from Zerkow’s old house, she came suddenly upon the dentist’s concertina under a heap of old clothes in the closet.  Within twenty minutes she had sold it to the dealer in second-hand furniture, returning to her room with seven dollars in her pocket, happy for the first time since McTeague had left her.

But for all that the match-box and the bag refused to fill up; after three weeks of the most rigid economy they contained but eighteen dollars and some small change.  What was that compared with four hundred?  Trina told herself that she must have her money in hand.  She longed to see again the heap of it upon her work-table, where she could plunge her hands into it, her face into it, feeling the cool, smooth metal upon her cheeks.  At such moments she would see in her imagination her wonderful five thousand