midnight
Maria took advantage of this favourable charge , without too minutely enquiring into the cause ; and such was her eagerness to hold human converse , and to see her former protector , still a stranger to her , that she incessantly requested her guard to gratify her more than curiosity . Writing to Darnford , she was led from the sad objects before her , and frequently rendered insensible to the horrid noises around her , which previously had continually employed her feverish fancy . Thinking it selfish to dwell on her own sufferings , when in the midst of wretches , who had not only lost all that endears life , but their very selves , her imagination was occupied with melancholy earnestness to trace the mazes of misery , through which so many wretches must have passed to this gloomy receptacle of disjointed souls , to the grand source of human corruption . Often at midnight was she waked by the dismal shrieks of demoniac rage , or of excruciating despair , uttered in such wild tones of indescribable anguish as proved the total absence of reason , and roused phantoms of horror in her mind , far more terrific than all that dreaming superstition ever drew . Besides , there was frequently something so inconceivably picturesque in the varying gestures of unrestrained passion , so irresistibly comic in their sallies , or so heart-piercingly pathetic in the little airs they would sing , frequently bursting out after an awful silence , as to fascinate the attention , and amuse the fancy , while torturing the soul . It was the uproar of the passions which she was compelled to observe ; and to mark the lucid beam of reason , like a light trembling in a socket , or like the flash which divides the threatening clouds of angry heaven only to display the horrors which darkness shrouded . Jemima would labour to beguile the tedious evenings , by describing the persons and manners of the unfortunate beings , whose figures or voices awoke sympathetic sorrow in Maria 's bosom ; and the stories she told were the more interesting , for perpetually leaving room to conjecture something extraordinary .