The people about the house and the clerks at the provision stores often
remarked that Trina's fingertips were swollen and the nails purple as
though they had been shut in a door. Indeed, this was the explanation
she gave. The fact of the matter was that McTeague, when he had been
drinking, used to bite them, crunching and grinding them with his
immense teeth, always ingenious enough to remember which were the
sorest. Sometimes he extorted money from her by this means, but as often
as not he did it for his own satisfaction.
And in some strange, inexplicable way this brutality made Trina all
the more affectionate; aroused in her a morbid, unwholesome love of
submission, a strange, unnatural pleasure in yielding, in surrendering
herself to the will of an irresistible, virile power.
Trina's emotions had narrowed with the narrowing of her daily life. They
reduced themselves at last to but two, her passion for her money and
her perverted love for her husband when he was brutal. She was a strange
woman during these days.
Trina had come to be on very intimate terms with Maria Macapa, and
in the end the dentist's wife and the maid of all work became great
friends. Maria was constantly in and out of Trina's room, and, whenever
she could, Trina threw a shawl over her head and returned Maria's calls.
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