noon
Then suddenly his poor heart puckered up like a persimmon with the ghastly , grim shock which a man experiences when he realizes for the first time that the woman whom he loves is not shy , but -- _ stingy _ . With snow and gloom and pain and loneliness the rest of the day dragged by . Hour after hour , helpless , hopeless , utterly impotent as though Time itself were bleeding to death , the minutes bubbled and dripped from the old wooden clock . By noon the room was as murky as dish-water , and Stanton lay and fretted in the messy , sudsy snow-light like a forgotten knife or spoon until the janitor wandered casually in about three o'clock and wrung a piercing little wisp of flame out of the electric-light bulb over the sick man 's head , and raised him clumsily out of his soggy pillows and fed him indolently with a sad , thin soup . Worst of all , four times in the dreadful interim between breakfast and supper the postman 's thrilly footsteps soared up the long metallic stairway like an ecstatically towering high-note , only to flat off discordantly at Stanton 's door without even so much as a one-cent advertisement issuing from the letter-slide . -- And there would be thirty or forty more days just like this the doctor had assured him ; and Cornelia had said that -- perhaps , if she felt like it -- she would write -- six -- times . Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp , and smutted first the bedquilt , then the hearth-rug , then the window-seat , and then at last the great , stormy , faraway outside world .