noon
`` You wo n't know till afterward , '' it said . `` You wo n't know till long , long afterward . '' The End of Afterward THE FULNESS OF LIFE December 1893 For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor , not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon , when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects , and , lying sunk in the tasselled meadow-grasses , one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast shadowless , and unsuggestive blue . Now and then , at ever-lengthening intervals , a flash of pain darted through her , like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky ; but it was too transitory to shake her stupor , that calm , delicious , bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply , without a disturbing impulse of resistance , an effort of reattachment to the vanishing edges of consciousness . The resistance , the effort , had known their hour of violence ; but now they were at an end . Through her mind , long harried by grotesque visions , fragmentary images of the life that she was leaving , tormenting lines of verse , obstinate presentments of pictures once beheld , indistinct impressions of rivers , towers , and cupolas , gathered in the length of journeys half forgotten -- through her mind there now only moved a few primal sensations of colorless well-being ; a vague satisfaction in the thought that she had swallowed her noxious last draught of medicine ... and that she should never again hear the creaking of her husband 's boots -- those horrible boots -- and that no one would come to bother her about the next day 's dinner ... or the butcher 's book ... .