six o'clock
The letters were in many moods , playful , reflective , sad , despairing , arch , but all were written in an ecstasy of the purest love , and most of them were cheerful , so that you seemed to see the sun dancing on the paper while she wrote , the same sun that afterwards showed up her painted cheeks . Why they came back to her no one ever discovered , any more than how she who slipped the violet into that three-cornered one and took it out to kiss again and wrote , `` It is my first love-letter , and I love it so much I am reluctant to let it go , '' became in a few years the derision of the Double Dykes . Some of these letters may be in old kists still , but whether that is so or not , they alone have passed the Painted Lady 's memory from one generation to another , and they have purified it , so that what she was died with her vile body , and what she might have been lived on , as if it were her true self . `` Miss Alison Cray presents her compliments to -- and requests the favor of their company at her marriage with Mr. Ivie McLean , on January 8th , at six o'clock . '' Tommy in his Sabbath clothes , with a rose from the Dovecot hot-house for buttonhole -LRB- which he slipped into his pocket when he saw other boys approaching -RRB- , delivered them at the doors of the aristocracy , where , by the way , he had been a few weeks earlier , with another circular . `` Miss Alison Cray being about to give up school , has pleasure in stating that she has disposed of the good-will of her establishment to Miss Jessy Langlands and Miss S. Oram , who will enter upon their scholastic duties on January 9th , at Hoods Cottage , where she most cordially , '' and so on . Here if the writer dared -LRB- but you would be so angry -RRB- he would introduce at the length of a chapter two brand-new characters , the Misses Langlands and Oram , who suddenly present themselves to him in the most sympathetic light .