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Then she would sleep and dream that once more Edward stood upon the threshold and kissed her and turned to his cold room; but she she had made a noble fire in her little grate; and the room was full of primroses, red and white and lilac; and the wall-clock chimed instead of striking an intoxicating fairy chime; and there were clear sheets as of old.
There was a fine brown dust in the air of the teeming room, and the sickening smell of new tobacco. Not a window in the place was open, and the strong steam heat seemed almost overwhelming. The women had now been at it for near nine hours. Damp, streaked faces, for the most part pale and somewhat heavy, turned incessantly toward the large wall-clock at one end of the room.
There stood yet the two well-scoured old deal-tables, wrinkled, though, from the protruding fibres of the wood; there were the straw-bottomed stools still; and at the window, Mother Martha's arm-chair, before which, as a child, he had repeated his lessons; there still hung the same little glass between the windows; and the wall-clock above the stove sent forth its tic-tac as fastly as ever.
It smelt of yesterday's tobacco, of dampness, sourness; and of something else peculiar, indeterminate, uninhabited, of which places that are lived in only temporarily always smell in the morning such as empty theatres, dance-halls, auditoriums. Far off in the city a droshky rumbled intermittently. The wall-clock monotonously ticked behind the wall.
Blount stopped his machine at the nearest corner and got out to reconnoitre the office-building entrance. In the vestibule he glanced up at the face of the illuminated wall-clock, making a hasty calculation based upon the leaving time of the east-bound Overland.
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