The volumes of the
"Practical Dentist" and the "American System of Dentistry" were piled
upon the marble-top centre-table in rectangular blocks. The few chairs
were drawn up against the wall under the steel engraving of "Lorenzo
de' Medici" with more than usual precision. The dental engine and the
nickelled trimmings of the operating chair had been furbished till they
shone, while on the movable rack in the bay window McTeague had arranged
his instruments with the greatest neatness and regularity. "Hoe"
excavators, pluggers, forceps, pliers, corundum disks and burrs, even
the boxwood mallet that Trina was never to use again, all were laid out
and ready for immediate use.
McTeague himself sat in his operating chair, looking stupidly out of the
windows, across the roofs opposite, with an unseeing gaze, his red hands
lying idly in his lap. Trina came up to him. There was something in his
eyes that made her put both arms around his neck and lay his huge head
with its coarse blond hair upon her shoulder.
"I--I got everything fixed," he said. "I got everything fixed an' ready.
See, everything ready an' waiting, an'--an'--an' nobody comes, an'
nobody's ever going to come any more.
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