seven in the morning
There was a tobacconist 's shop whose unwashed windows revealed an array of large wooden buckets and dusty lithographs ; a shoe shop that did repairing neatly while you waited ; a rather fly-specked looking bakery . There was a saloon on the corner , and beside it , a four-foot doorway with a painted transom over it that announced it as the entrance of the Bellevue Hotel . The signs on the second-story windows indicated dentist parlors , the homes of mid-wives , ladies ' tailors and dressmakers , and everywhere furnished rooms for light housekeeping to let . The people who patronized those shops , who drank their beer at the corner saloon , who 'd be coming hurriedly in the night to ring up the mid-wife , who smoked the sort of tobacco that was sold from those big wooden buckets ; the people who lounged along the wide sidewalks , or came riding down-town at seven in the morning , and back at six at night , packed so tight that they could n't get their arms up to hold by the straps in the big roaring cars that kept that incessant procession going in the middle of the street -- they all inhabited , Rose realized , a world utterly different from the one she had left . The distance between the hurrying life she looked out on through her grimy window , and that which she had been wont to contemplate through Florence McCrea 's exquisitely leaded casements , was simply planetary . And yet , queerly enough , in terms of literal lineal measurement , the distance between the windows themselves , was less than a thousand yards . Less than ten minutes ' walking from the mouth of the little tunnel alongside the delicatessen shop , would take her back to her husband 's door .