She
never wore them now. She still took pride in neatly combing and coiling
her wonderful black hair, but as the days passed she found it more and
more comfortable to work in her blue flannel wrapper. Whittlings and
chips accumulated under the window where she did her work, and she was
at no great pains to clear the air of the room vitiated by the fumes of
the oil stove and heavy with the smell of cooking. It was not gay, that
life. The room itself was not gay. The huge double bed sprawled over
nearly a fourth of the available space; the angles of Trina's trunk and
the washstand projected into the room from the walls, and barked shins
and scraped elbows. Streaks and spots of the "non-poisonous" paint that
Trina used were upon the walls and wood-work. However, in one corner of
the room, next the window, monstrous, distorted, brilliant, shining with
a light of its own, stood the dentist's sign, the enormous golden tooth,
the tooth of a Brobdingnag.
One afternoon in September, about four months after the McTeagues had
left their suite, Trina was at her work by the window. She had whittled
some half-dozen sets of animals, and was now busy painting them and
making the arks.
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