About midnight
At present no such analysis was possible to Anthony . His clarity of mind , all those endless resources which he thought his irony had brought him were swept aside . Not only for that night but for the days and weeks that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape -- that world was cold and full of bleak wind , and for a little while he had seen into a warm house where fires shone . About midnight he began to realize that he was hungry . He went down into Fifty-second Street , where it was so cold that he could scarcely see ; the moisture froze on his lashes and in the corners of his lips . Everywhere dreariness had come down from the north , settling upon the thin and cheerless street , where black bundled figures blacker still against the night , moved stumbling along the sidewalk through the shrieking wind , sliding their feet cautiously ahead as though they were on skis . Anthony turned over toward Sixth Avenue , so absorbed in his thoughts as not to notice that several passers-by had stared at him .