ten o'clock
A man 's room . Books , uncurving furniture , photographs of his parents taken on their twenty-fifth anniversary standing on the chiffonier in a double leather frame that opened like a book . Face down on the reading table beside the glass of milk , quite as he must have left it the night before , except where Sara had lifted it to dust under , a copy of Bishop 's _ New Criminal Law _ , already a prognosis , as it were , of that branch of the law he was ultimately and brilliantly to bend to fuller justice . Finally , toward morning Nicholas slept , and at ten o'clock of a rain-swept Sunday forenoon awoke , as he knew he must , to the grip of a blinding headache , so called for want of a better noun to interpret the kind of agony which , starting somewhere around his eyes , could prick each nerve of his body into a little flame , as if countless matches had been struck . As a youngster these attacks had not been infrequent , usually after a fit of crying . The first , in fact , had followed the burning of the cat ; a duet of twin spasms then , howled into Sara 's apron , And once after he had fished an exhausted comrade out of an ice hole in Bronx Park . They had followed the lead-pipe affairs and the Chinese-laundry episode with dreadful inevitability .