Consider that it was four o'clock of a Monday afternoon, and under the dishwater-gray window shade-just the sort of shade one sees pulled down over the windows of cheap hotels fronting the sooty elevateds of American cities where the baffled and the derelict loiter and shift their feet-under this one shade, in the window of a building off Fifty-third Street on Eighth Avenue in New York, the wizened October sun stretched its old finger to touch the dark, flutterless lids of Walden Blue, causing him to stir among sheets a week of dawntime lying down and twilight getting up had rumpled.