midnight
She had subsequently lived , for hours she could n't count , under the dizzying , smothering welter positively in submarine depths where everything came to her through walls of emerald and mother-of-pearl ; though indeed she had got her head above them , for breath , when face to face with Charlotte again , on the morrow , in Eaton Square . Meanwhile , none the less , as was so apparent , the prior , the prime impression had remained , in the manner of a spying servant , on the other side of the barred threshold ; a witness availing himself , in time , of the lightest pretext to re-enter . It was as if he had found this pretext in her observed necessity of comparing -- comparing the obvious common elements in her husband 's and her stepmother 's ways of now `` taking '' her . With or without her witness , at any rate , she was led by comparison to a sense of the quantity of earnest intention operating , and operating so harmoniously , between her companions ; and it was in the mitigated midnight of these approximations that she had made out the promise of her dawn . It was a worked-out scheme for their not wounding her , for their behaving to her quite nobly ; to which each had , in some winning way , induced the other to contribute , and which therefore , so far as that went , proved that she had become with them a subject of intimate study . Quickly , quickly , on a certain alarm taken , eagerly and anxiously , before they SHOULD , without knowing it , wound her , they had signalled from house to house their clever idea , the idea by which , for all these days , her own idea had been profiting . They had built her in with their purpose -- which was why , above her , a vault seemed more heavily to arch ; so that she sat there , in the solid chamber of her helplessness , as in a bath of benevolence artfully prepared for her , over the brim of which she could but just manage to see by stretching her neck .