noon
Lizzie is my best friend . '' Then she related how Ed had come back from the stocking mill in Lowell , Massachusetts , to find her and Lizzie grown up , and what an accomplished young man he was , and how he thought nothing of squandering half-a-dollar for ice-cream and oysters to celebrate his entry as clerk into the woollen department of Macy 's . Before she finished I began to paint , and she resumed the pose , smiling and chattering like a sparrow . By noon I had the study fairly well rubbed in and Tessie came to look at it . `` That 's better , '' she said . I thought so too , and ate my lunch with a satisfied feeling that all was going well . Tessie spread her lunch on a drawing table opposite me and we drank our claret from the same bottle and lighted our cigarettes from the same match .