seven o'clock
The influence of such a paltry nature upon a woman of my mother 's strength and endowments had always astonished as much as it had irritated me . I had not learnt then what I fully learnt afterwards , that in this life it is mostly the dull and stupid people who dominate the clever ones -- that it is , in short , the fools who govern the world . I should , of course , never have gone to Belgrave Square at all had it not been to see my mother . Such a commonplace slave of convention was my aunt , that , on the evening I am now mentioning , she had scarcely spoken to me during dinner , because , having been detained at the solicitor 's , I had found it quite impossible to go to my hotel to dress for her ridiculous seven o'clock dinner . When I found that my mother had actually taken this inferior woman into her confidence in regard to my affairs and told her all about Winnie and the cross , my dislike of her became intensified , and on this evening my mother very much vexed me in the drawing-room by taking the cross from a cabinet and saying to me , ` What is now to be done with this ? All along the coast there are such notions about its value that to replace it in the tomb would be simple madness . ' I made no reply .