midnight
He regarded beautiful offices as in some way effeminate ... . His was n't effeminate ; it was undecorative as a filled ash-tray , despite Una 's daily following up of the careless scrubwomen with dust-cloth and whisk . She knew every inch of it , as a gardener knows his plot . She could never keep from noticing and running her finger along the pebbled glass of the oak-and-glass partition about Mr. Wilkins 's private office , each of the hundreds of times a day she passed it ; and when she lay awake at midnight , her finger-tips would recall precisely the feeling of that rough surface , even to the sharp edges of a tiny flaw in the glass over the bookcase . Or she would recall the floor-rag -- symbol of the hard realness of the office grind ... . It always hung over the twisted , bulbous lead pipes below the stationary basin in the women 's wash-room provided by the Septimus Building for the women on three floors . It was a rag ancient and slate-gray , grotesquely stiff and grotesquely hairy at its frayed edges -- a corpse of a scrub-rag in _ rigor mortis _ .