“All right, all right,” cried the dentist, hastily, feeling in his pockets.  “I don’t want you should be out anything on my account, old man.  Here, will four bits do?”

“I don’t want your damn money,” shouted Marcus in a sudden rage, throwing back the coin.  “I ain’t no beggar.”

McTeague was miserable.  How had he offended his pal?

“Well, I want you should take it, Mark,” he said, pushing it towards him.

“I tell you I won’t touch your money,” exclaimed the other through his clenched teeth, white with passion.  “I’ve been played for a sucker long enough.”

“What’s the matter with you lately, Mark?” remonstrated McTeague.  “You’ve got a grouch about something.  Is there anything I’ve done?”

“Well, that’s all right, that’s all right,” returned Marcus as he rose from the table.  “That’s all right.  I’ve been played for a sucker long enough, that’s all.  I’ve been played for a sucker long enough.”  He went away with a parting malevolent glance.

At the corner of Polk Street, between the flat and the car conductors’ coffee-joint, was Frenna’s.  It was a corner grocery; advertisements for cheap butter and eggs, painted in green marking-ink upon wrapping paper, stood about on the sidewalk outside.  The doorway was decorated with a huge Milwaukee beer sign.  Back of the store proper was a bar where white sand covered the floor.  A few tables and chairs were scattered here and there.  The walls were hung with gorgeously-colored tobacco advertisements and colored lithographs of trotting horses.  On the wall behind the bar was a model of a full-rigged ship enclosed in a bottle.

It was at this place that the dentist used to leave his pitcher to be filled on Sunday afternoons.  Since his engagement to Trina he had discontinued this habit.  However, he still dropped into Frenna’s one or two nights in the week.  He spent a pleasant hour there, smoking his huge porcelain pipe and drinking his beer.  He never joined any of the groups of piquet players around the tables.  In fact, he hardly spoke to anyone but the bartender and Marcus.

For Frenna’s was one of Marcus Schouler’s haunts; a great deal of his time was spent there.  He involved himself in fearful political and social discussions with Heise the harness-maker, and with one or two old German, habitues of the place.  These discussions Marcus carried on, as was his custom, at the top of his voice, gesticulating fiercely, banging the table with his fists, brandishing the plates and glasses, exciting himself with his own clamor.

On a certain Saturday evening, a few days after the scene at the coffee-joint, the dentist bethought him to spend a quiet evening at Frenna’s.  He had not been there for some time, and, besides that, it occurred to him that the day was his birthday.  He would permit himself an extra pipe and a few glasses of beer.  When McTeague entered Frenna’s back room by the street door, he found Marcus and Heise already installed at one of the tables.  Two or three of the old Germans sat opposite them, gulping their beer from time to time.  Heise was smoking a cigar, but Marcus had before him his fourth whiskey cocktail.  At the moment of McTeague’s entrance Marcus had the floor.