one o'clock
It must not be supposed that duelling , puzzles over the portmanteau , or the machinations of Susan had put out of Miss Mapp 's head her amiable interest in the hour at which Major Benjy went to bed . For some time she had been content to believe , on direct information from him , that he went to bed early and worked at his diaries on alternate evenings , but maturer consideration had led her to wonder whether he was being quite as truthful as a gallant soldier should be . For though -LRB- on alternate evenings -RRB- his house would be quite dark by half-past nine , it was not for twelve hours or more afterwards that he could be heard qui-hi-ing for his breakfast , and unless he was in some incipient stage of sleeping-sickness , such hours provided more than ample slumber for a growing child , and might be considered excessive for a middle-aged man . She had a mass of evidence to show that on the other set of alternate nights his diaries -LRB- which must , in parenthesis , be of extraordinary fullness -RRB- occupied him into the small hours , and to go to bed at half-past nine on one night and after one o'clock on the next implied a complicated kind of regularity which cried aloud for elucidation . If he had only breakfasted early on the mornings after he had gone to bed early , she might have allowed herself to be weakly credulous , but he never qui-hied earlier than half-past nine , and she could not but think that to believe blindly in such habits would be a triumph not for faith but for foolishness . `` People , '' said Miss Mapp to herself , as her attention refused to concentrate on the evening paper , `` do n't do it . I never heard of a similar case . ''