Then one day at San Francisco had come the news of his mother’s death; she had left him some money—­not much, but enough to set him up in business; so he had cut loose from the charlatan and had opened his “Dental Parlors” on Polk Street, an “accommodation street” of small shops in the residence quarter of the town.  Here he had slowly collected a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks, and car conductors.  He made but few acquaintances.  Polk Street called him the “Doctor” and spoke of his enormous strength.  For McTeague was a young giant, carrying his huge shock of blond hair six feet three inches from the ground; moving his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly, ponderously.  His hands were enormous, red, and covered with a fell of stiff yellow hair; they were hard as wooden mallets, strong as vises, the hands of the old-time car-boy.  Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a refractory tooth with his thumb and finger.  His head was square-cut, angular; the jaw salient, like that of the carnivora.

McTeague’s mind was as his body, heavy, slow to act, sluggish.  Yet there was nothing vicious about the man.  Altogether he suggested the draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient.

When he opened his “Dental Parlors,” he felt that his life was a success, that he could hope for nothing better.  In spite of the name, there was but one room.  It was a corner room on the second floor over the branch post-office, and faced the street.  McTeague made it do for a bedroom as well, sleeping on the big bed-lounge against the wall opposite the window.  There was a washstand behind the screen in the corner where he manufactured his moulds.  In the round bay window were his operating chair, his dental engine, and the movable rack on which he laid out his instruments.  Three chairs, a bargain at the second-hand store, ranged themselves against the wall with military precision underneath a steel engraving of the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which he had bought because there were a great many figures in it for the money.  Over the bed-lounge hung a rifle manufacturer’s advertisement calendar which he never used.  The other ornaments were a small marble-topped centre table covered with back numbers of “The American System of Dentistry,” a stone pug dog sitting before the little stove, and a thermometer.  A stand of shelves occupied one corner, filled with the seven volumes of “Allen’s Practical Dentist.”  On the top shelf McTeague kept his concertina and a bag of bird seed for the canary.  The whole place exhaled a mingled odor of bedding, creosote, and ether.

But for one thing, McTeague would have been perfectly contented.  Just outside his window was his signboard—­a modest affair—­that read:  “Doctor McTeague.  Dental Parlors.  Gas Given”; but that was all.  It was his ambition, his dream, to have projecting from that corner window a huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous and attractive.  He would have it some day, on that he was resolved; but as yet such a thing was far beyond his means.