noon
Apparently it was only ` climates ' that were allowed any such privileges with girls like Cornelia . Yet , after all , was n't it just exactly that very quality of serene , dignified aloofness that had attracted him first to Cornelia among the score of freer-mannered girls of his acquaintance ? '' Glumly reverting to his morning paper , he began to read and reread with dogged persistence each item of politics and foreign news -- each gibbering advertisement . At noon the postman dropped some kind of a message through the slit in the door , but the plainly discernible green one-cent stamp forbade any possible hope that it was a letter from the South . At four o'clock again someone thrust an offensive pink gas bill through the letter-slide . At six o'clock Stanton stubbornly shut his eyes up perfectly tight and muffled his ears in the pillow so that he would not even know whether the postman came or not . The only thing that finally roused him to plain , grown-up sense again was the joggle of the janitor 's foot kicking mercilessly against the bed .