noon
There is a quiet mood , an inner calm , to which a grey day adds peculiar solace . It is like the relief which follows after tears , when hope begins to revive , and the warm blood throbs rebelliously to be free of the shackles of grief ; a certain heaviness still lingers , but only as a luxurious languor which is a pleasure in itself . In other moods , however , in pain , in doubt , in suspense , the grey day deepens the depression of the spirits , and also adds to the sense of physical discomfort . Mrs. Caldwell , looking up at noon from the stocking she was mending , and seeing only a slender strip of level gloom above the houses opposite , suddenly experienced a mingled feeling of chilliness and dread , and longed for a fire , although the month was June . She could not afford fires at that time of year , yet she thought how nice it would be to have one , and the more she thought of it the more chilly she felt . A little comfort of the kind would have meant so much to her that morning . She would like to have felt it right to put away the mending , sit by a good blaze with a book , and absorb herself in somebody else 's thoughts , for her own were far from cheerful .