six
o'clock
She had a look as if she had tripped out of a Japanese fan , and slept at night in a pot-pourri jar . And she had brains , those good things -- brains . Her name was very like her life , one-half of which might be described as Myrtilla , the other half as Williamson . She was Myrtilla during the day , dabbling with her water-colours , her flowers , or her books ; but at six o'clock each afternoon , with the sound of aggressive masculine boots in the hall , her life suddenly changed with a sigh to Williamson . The Williamson half of her life was so clumsily , so grotesquely ill-matched with the Myrtilla half that it was , and probably will always remain , a mystery why she had ever attempted so tasteless and inconvenient an addition , -- a mystery , however , far from unique in the history of those mysteriously stupid unhappy marriages with evident boors which refined and charming women will , it is to be feared , go on making to the end of the human chapter . It was perhaps a day hardly less interesting for Myrtilla than for the young people themselves when she had first met Henry and Esther Mesurier . Before , in the dull bourgeois society into which Williamson had transplanted her from London , she had found none with whom she dared be her natural Myrtilla .