Occasionally they met Heise the harness-maker and his wife, with whom they had become acquainted.  Then the evening was concluded by a four-cornered party in the Luxembourg, a quiet German restaurant under a theatre.  Trina had a tamale and a glass of beer, Mrs. Heise (who was a decayed writing teacher) ate salads, with glasses of grenadine and currant syrups.  Heise drank cocktails and whiskey straight, and urged the dentist to join him.  But McTeague was obstinate, shaking his head.  “I can’t drink that stuff,” he said.  “It don’t agree with me, somehow; I go kinda crazy after two glasses.”  So he gorged himself with beer and frankfurter sausages plastered with German mustard.

When the annual Mechanic’s Fair opened, McTeague and Trina often spent their evenings there, studying the exhibits carefully (since in Trina’s estimation education meant knowing things and being able to talk about them).  Wearying of this they would go up into the gallery, and, leaning over, look down into the huge amphitheatre full of light and color and movement.

There rose to them the vast shuffling noise of thousands of feet and a subdued roar of conversation like the sound of a great mill.  Mingled with this was the purring of distant machinery, the splashing of a temporary fountain, and the rhythmic jangling of a brass band, while in the piano exhibit a hired performer was playing upon a concert grand with a great flourish.  Nearer at hand they could catch ends of conversation and notes of laughter, the noise of moving dresses, and the rustle of stiffly starched skirts.  Here and there school children elbowed their way through the crowd, crying shrilly, their hands full of advertisement pamphlets, fans, picture cards, and toy whips, while the air itself was full of the smell of fresh popcorn.

They even spent some time in the art gallery.  Trina’s cousin Selina, who gave lessons in hand painting at two bits an hour, generally had an exhibit on the walls, which they were interested to find.  It usually was a bunch of yellow poppies painted on black velvet and framed in gilt.  They stood before it some little time, hazarding their opinions, and then moved on slowly from one picture to another.  Trina had McTeague buy a catalogue and made a duty of finding the title of every picture.  This, too, she told McTeague, as a kind of education one ought to cultivate.  Trina professed to be fond of art, having perhaps acquired a taste for painting and sculpture from her experience with the Noah’s ark animals.

“Of course,” she told the dentist, “I’m no critic, I only know what I like.”  She knew that she liked the “Ideal Heads,” lovely girls with flowing straw-colored hair and immense, upturned eyes.  These always had for title, “Reverie,” or “An Idyll,” or “Dreams of Love.”

“I think those are lovely, don’t you, Mac?” she said.

“Yes, yes,” answered McTeague, nodding his head, bewildered, trying to understand.  “Yes, yes, lovely, that’s the word.  Are you dead sure now, Trina, that all that’s hand-painted just like the poppies?”