six o'clock
Of late years , or , more specifically , for two years and eight months , another picture had invaded , even superseded the old . A stamp-photograph likeness of Mr. James P. Batch in the corner of Miss Slayback 's mirror , and thereafter No Man 's slippers became number eight-and-a-half C , and the hearth a gilded radiator in a dining-living-room somewhere between the Fourteenth Street Subway and the land of the Bronx . How Miss Slayback , by habit not gregarious , met Mr. Batch is of no consequence , except to those snug ones of us to whom an introduction is the only means to such an end . At a six o'clock that invaded even Union Square with heliotrope dusk , Mr. James Batch mistook , who shall say otherwise , Miss Gertie Slayback , as she stepped down into the wintry shade of a Subway kiosk , for Miss Whodoesitmatter . At seven o'clock , over a dish of lamb stew _ à la _ White Kitchen , he confessed , and if Miss Slayback affected too great surprise and too little indignation , try to conceive six nine-hour week-in-and week-out days of hairpins and darning-balls , and then , at a heliotrope dusk , James P. Batch , in invitational mood , stepping in between it and the papered walls of a dun-colored evening . To further enlist your tolerance , Gertie Slayback 's eyes were as blue as the noon of June , and James P. Batch , in a belted-in coat and five kid finger-points protruding ever so slightly and rightly from a breast pocket , was hewn and honed in the image of youth . His the smile of one for whom life 's cup holds a heady wine , a wrinkle or two at the eye only serving to enhance that smile ; a one-inch feather stuck upright in his derby hatband .