noon
He had ended by being able to smile at his literary ambitions of twenty , cultivating his indolence as something choice and original , finding his destiny appropriate . He spent the time in interminable reveries , sitting with a volume before him , as often as not unopened , smoking incessantly , and looking out of the window . The habit amused himself at times ; it was so eminently symbolic of his destiny . Life , after all , had been to him nothing so much as that -- a long looking out of window , the impartial spectatorship of a crowd of persons and passions from which he had come at last to seem strangely detached , almost as much as from this chameleon river , which he had observed with such satisfaction in all its manifold gradations of character and colour ; its curious cold grayness in the beginning of an autumnal dawn ; the illusion of warmth and depth which it sustained at noon , bringing up its burden of leviathans on the top of the flood ; its sheen on moonless nights , when only little punctures , green and red and orange , and its audible stillness , reminded him that down in the obscurity the great polluted stream stole on wearily , monotonously , everlastingly to the sea . It was changeful and changeless . He thought he knew its effects by heart , but it had always new ones in reserve to surprise and delight him . He declared it at last to be inexhaustible .