eleven o'clock
The woman , who , like the man , was in her stocking feet , crossed the room , closing the door with all softness behind her . She felt her way silently through the darkness of a small hallway , putting first her ear and then her eye to a tiny cranny in some thick curtains at a front window . She looked downward and outward upon one of those New York side streets that is precisely like forty other New York side streets : two unbroken lines of high-shouldered , narrow-chested brick-and-stone houses , rising in abrupt , straight cliffs ; at the bottom of the canyon a narrow river of roadway with manholes and conduit covers dotting its channel intermittently like scattered stepping stones ; and on either side wide , flat pavements , as though the stream had fallen to low-water mark and left bare its shallow banks . Daylight would have shown most of the houses boarded up , with diamond-shaped vents , like leering eyes , cut in the painted planking of the windows and doors ; but now it was night time -- eleven o'clock of a wet , hot , humid night of the late summer -- and the street was buttoned down its length in the double-breasted fashion of a bandmaster 's coat with twin rows of gas lamps evenly spaced . Under each small circle of lighted space the dripping , black asphalt had a slimy , slick look like the sides of a newly caught catfish . Elsewhere the whole vista lay all in close shadow , black as a cave mouth under every stoop front and blacker still in the hooded basement areas . Only , half a mile to the eastward a dim , distant flicker showed where Broadway ran , a broad , yellow streak down the spine of the city , and high above the broken skyline of eaves and cornices there rolled in cloudy waves the sullen red radiance , born of a million electrics and the flares from gas tanks and chimneys , which is only to be seen on such nights as this , giving to the heaven above New York that same color tone you find in an artist 's conception of Babylon falling or Rome burning .