midnight
There were times -- since this is history , not romance -- when her spirits flagged and her strength failed her . The heat of the summer was intense , and the breathless days dragged on interminably into the breathless nights . When her work was over she would wait until the last of her fellow-workers had gone home , and then walk across to Sixth Avenue and take the Harlem elevated train for her deserted rooms , which appeared more desolate , more ugly than ever because the children were absent . In the lonely kitchen -- for Miss Danton and the art students were all away -- she would eat her supper of bread and tea , which she drank without cream because it was more economical ; and then , lighting her lamp , she would sew or read until midnight . Sometimes , when it was too hot for the lamp , and she found it impossible to work by the flickering gas , she would sit by her window and look down on the panting humanity in the street below -- on the small shopkeepers seated in chairs on the sidewalk , on the little son of the Italian fruiterer playing with his dog , on the three babies of the Jewish tobacco merchant , sprawling in the door of the tiny shop which was pressed like a sardine between a bakery and a dairy . She was alone in the apartment , and there were late afternoons when the grim emptiness of the rooms seemed haunted , when she shrank back in apprehensive foreboding as she turned her key in the lock , when the profound silence within preyed on her nerves like an obsession . On these days she dreaded to go down the long hail to the kitchen , where the fluttering clothes-lines on fire-escapes at the back of the next apartment house offered the only suggestion of human companionship in the unfriendly wilderness of the city .