about eleven o'clock
There was something almost religious in its quiet . Some one often sat there who , whatever his commonplace disguises as a provincial man of business , however inadequate to his powers the work life had given him to do , provincial and humiliating as were the formulae with which narrowing conditions had supplied him for expression of himself , was in his central being an aristocrat , -- though that was the very last word James Mesurier would have thought of applying to himself . He was a man of business , serving God and his employers with stern uprightness , and bringing up a large family with something of the Puritan severity which had marked his own early training ; and , as in his own case no such allowance had been made , making no allowance in his rigid abstract code for the diverse temperaments of his children , -- children in whom certain qualities and needs of his own nature , dormant from his birth , were awakening , supplemented by the fuller-fed intelligence and richer nature of the mother , into expansive and rebellious individualities . It was now about eleven o'clock , and the house was thus lit and alive half-an-hour beyond the rigorously enforced bed-time . An hour before , James Mesurier had been peacefully engaged on the task which had been nightly with him at this hour for twenty-five years , -- the writing of his diary , in a shorthand which he wrote with a neatness , almost a daintiness , that always marked his use of pen and ink , and gave to his merely commercial correspondence and his quite exquisitely kept accounts , a certain touch of the scholar , -- again an air of distinction in excess of , and unaccounted for , by the nature of the interests which it dignified . His somewhat narrow range of reading , had you followed it by his careful markings through those bound volumes of sermons in the bookcase , bore the same evidence of inherited and inadequately occupied refinement . His life from boyhood had been too much of a struggle to leave him much leisure for reading , and such as he had enjoyed had been diverted into evangelical channels by the influence of a certain pious old lady , with whom as a young man he had boarded , and for whose memory all his life he cherished a reverence little short of saint-worship .