Every other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazy with alcohol.
McTeague remembered his mother, too, who, with the help of the Chinaman, cooked for forty miners.

She was an overworked drudge, fiery and energetic for all that, filled with the one idea of having her son rise in life and enter a profession.

The chance had come at last when the father died, corroded with alcohol, collapsing in a few hours.

Two or three years later a travelling dentist visited the mine and put up his tent near the bunk-house.

He was more or less of a charlatan, but he fired Mrs.McTeague's ambition, and young McTeague went away with him to learn his profession.