noon
The next morning , when the younger girls came down to breakfast , they found only the three women in the kitchen . An odour of coffee hung in the air . Belle was scraping burned toast at the sink , the flying , sooty particles clinging to wet surfaces everywhere . Lydia sat packing cold hominy in empty baking-powder tins ; to be sliced and fried for the noon meal . Mrs. Monroe , preferring an informal kitchen breakfast to her own society in the dining room , was standing by the kitchen table , alternating swallows from a saucerless cup of hot coffee with indifferent mouthfuls of buttered cold bread . She rarely went to the trouble of toasting her own bread , spending twice the energy required to do so in protests against the trouble . Lydia had breakfasted an hour ago .