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pans, your plates and cups and saucers, your clothes and rags and soaps and sudsy water; go back, go back and leave us; we are fed and we are pleasantly distended, great thoughts possess us; drowsy dreams; we would lie alone and contemplate our navel--it is afternoon!
 "Boy, boy!--Where has he got to now!... Oh, I could see him lookin' round.... I saw him edgin' towards the door!... Aha, I thought, he thinks he's very smart... but I knew exactly what he planned to do... to slip out and to get away before I caught him... and just because he was afraid I had a little work for him to do!"
 A little work! Aye, there's the rub--if only it were not always just a little work we had to do! If only in their minds there ever were a moment of supreme occasion or sublime event! If only it were not al ways just a little thing they have in mind, a little work we had to do!
 If only there were something, just a spark of joy to lift the heart, a spark of magic to fire the spirit, a spark of understanding of the thing we want to do, a grain of feeling, or an atom of imagination! But always it is just a little work, a little thing we have to do!
 Is it the little labor that she asks that we begrudge? Is it the little effort which it would require that we abhor? Is it the little help she asks for that we ungencrously withhold, a hate of work, a fear of sweat, a spirit of mean giving? No! It is not this at all. It is that women in the early afternoon are dull, and dully ask dull things of us; it is that women in the afternoon are dull, and ask us always for a little thing, and do not understand!
 It is that at this hour of day we do not want them near us--we would be alone. They smell of kitchen steam and drabness at this time of day: the depressing moistures of defunctive greens, left-over cabbage, lukewarm boilings, and the dinner scraps. An atmosphere of sudsy water now pervades them; their hands drip rinsings and their lives are grey.
 These people do not know it, out of mercy we have never told them; but their lives lack interest at three o'clock--we do not want them, they must let us be.
 They have some knowledge for the morning, some for afternoon, more for sunset, much for night; but at three o'clock they bore us, they must leave us be! They do not understand the thousand lights and weathers of the day as we; light is just light to them, and morning morning, and noon noon. They do not know the thing that comes and goes--the way light changes, and the way things shift; they do not know how brightness changes in the sun, and how man's spirit changes like a flick of light. Oh, they do not know, they cannot understand, the life of life, the joy of joy, the grief of grief unutterable, the eternity of living in a moment, the thing that changes as light changes, as swift and passing as a swallow's flight; they do not know the thing that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of Spring, the sharp and tongueless cry!
 They do not understand the joy and horror of the day as we can feel it; they do not understand the thing we dread at this hour of the afternoon.
 To them the light is light, the brief hour passing; their soaps-suds spirits do not contemplate the horror of hot light in afternoon. They do not understand our loathing of hot gardens, the way our spirits dull and sicken at hot light. They do not know how hope forsakes us, how joy flies away, when we look at the mottled torpor of hot light on the hydrangeas, the broad-leaved dullness of hot dock-weeds growing by the barn. They do not know the horror of old rusty cans filled into gaps of rubbish underneath the fence; the loathing of the mottled, hot, and torpid light upon a row of scraggly corn; the hopeless depth of torpid, dull depression which the sight of hot coarse grasses in the sun can rouse to a numb wakefulness of horror in our souls at three o'clock.
 It is a kind of torpid stagnancy of life, it is a hopelessness of hope, a dull, numb lifelessness of life!