six to nine in the evening
If we grow old and useless -- ' ` If no one will give us even board and lodging for our services -- ' ` If we have n't a friend to look to , ' Alice threw in , as though they were answering each other in a doleful litany , ` then indeed we shall be glad that nothing tempted us to entrench on our capital ! It would just keep us ' -- her voice sank -- ` from the workhouse . ' After this each took up a volume , and until teatime they read quietly . From six to nine in the evening they again talked and read alternately . Their conversation was now retrospective ; each revived memories of what she had endured in one or the other house of bondage . Never had it been their lot to serve ` really nice ' people -- this phrase of theirs was anything but meaningless . They had lived with more or less well-to-do families in the lower middle class -- people who could not have inherited refinement , and had not acquired any , neither proletarians nor gentlefolk , consumed with a disease of vulgar pretentiousness , inflated with the miasma of democracy .