three in the afternoon
Now , Mr. Joseph Hooper had excellent cause for being a sour old man , and in a measure was to be pitied because of his attitude toward the young of his species . He had not been well-used by his own children , although it is no more than right to explain that they were hardly what any one save a parent would call children when they turned against him . At that particular period in the history of the Hooper family , the youngest of Joseph 's three children was seventeen , the oldest twenty-two -- and it so happens that the crisis came just fifteen years prior to the opening scene in this tale . It did not actually come on Christmas Eve , but , as a matter of record , on the 2lst of December at about half-past three in the afternoon . At that precise instant a judge sitting on the bench in one of the courtrooms in New York City signed the decree divorcing Mrs. Joseph Hooper from her husband , and four minutes later the lady walked out of the building with her son and two daughters , all of them having deliberately turned their backs upon the miserable defendant in the case . As all of the children were of an age to legally choose the parent with whom they preferred to live , and as they elected to cast off the paternal for the maternal , it readily may be seen that Mr. Hooper was not entirely without proof that this is a cruel , heartless , ungrateful world and filled with gall . As a matter of fact , he had not been wholly to blame for the family crash , notwithstanding a rather loose respect on his part for the sanctity of the home .