midnight
At first she had needed excitement , company , the clinking of glasses , the encouragement of speech , the inspiration of the challenge , in order to arouse the desire to drink ; but she had soon reached the point where she drank alone . Then it was that she began to carry home a half-filled glass under her apron and hide it in a corner of the kitchen ; that she had taken to drinking those mixtures of white wine and brandy , of which she would take draught upon draught until she had found that for which she thirsted -- sleep . For what she craved was not the fevered brain , the happy confusion , the living folly , the delirious , waking dream of drunkenness ; what she needed , what she sought was the negative joy of sleep , Lethean , dreamless sleep , a leaden sleep falling upon her like the blow of the sledge upon the ox 's head : and she found it in those compounds which struck her down and stretched her out face downward on the waxed cover of the kitchen table . To sleep that overpowering sleep , to wallow , by day , in that midnight darkness , had come to mean to her a truce , deliverance from an existence that she had not the courage to continue or to end . An overwhelming longing for oblivion was all she felt when she awoke . The hours of her life that she passed in possession of her faculties , contemplating herself , examining her conscience , looking on at her own shame , seemed to her so execrable ! She preferred to kill them .