noon
Run along , children ! '' Half an hour later , glancing from a window , she saw them come from the hothouses and slowly cross the lawn . Arthur had a fine rose in his buttonhole and looked profoundly thoughtful . That morning and noon had been warm , though the stirrings of a feeble breeze made weather not flagrantly intemperate ; but at about three o'clock in the afternoon there came out of the southwest a heat like an affliction sent upon an accursed people , and the air was soon dead of it . Dripping negro ditch-diggers whooped with satires praising hell and hot weather , as the tossing shovels flickered up to the street level , where sluggish male pedestrians carried coats upon hot arms , and fanned themselves with straw hats , or , remaining covered , wore soaked handkerchiefs between scalp and straw . Clerks drooped in silent , big department stores , stenographers in offices kept as close to electric fans as the intervening bulk of their employers would let them ; guests in hotels left the lobbies and went to lie unclad upon their beds ; while in hospitals the patients murmured querulously against the heat , and perhaps against some noisy motorist who strove to feel the air by splitting it , not troubled by any foreboding that he , too , that hour next week , might need quiet near a hospital . The `` hot spell '' was a true spell , one upon men 's spirits ; for it was so hot that , in suburban outskirts , golfers crept slowly back over the low undulations of their club lands , abandoning their matches and returning to shelter .