six o'clock
From the windows of the room one could see directly up La Salle Street . The cable cars , as they made the turn into or out of the street at the corner of Monroe , threw momentary glares of red and green lights across the mists of rain , and filled the air continually with the jangle of their bells . Further on one caught a glimpse of the Court House rising from the pavement like a rain-washed cliff of black basalt , picked out with winking lights , and beyond that , at the extreme end of the vista , the girders and cables of the La Salle Street bridge . The sidewalks on either hand were encumbered with the `` six o'clock crowd '' that poured out incessantly from the street entrances of the office buildings . It was a crowd almost entirely of men , and they moved only in one direction , buttoned to the chin in rain coats , their umbrellas bobbing , their feet scuffling through the little pools of wet in the depressions of the sidewalk . They streamed from out the brokers ' offices and commission houses on either side of La Salle Street , continually , unendingly , moving with the dragging sluggishness of the fatigue of a hard day 's work . Under that grey sky and blurring veil of rain they lost their individualities , they became conglomerate -- a mass , slow-moving , black .