ten in the morning
Knowledge , instructing the sense , refining and multiplying needs , transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days ' work ; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh , with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy `` Let there not be , '' and the many-colored creation is shriveled up in blackness . Of a truth , Knowledge is power , but it is a power reined by scruple , having a conscience of what must be and what may be ; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who , let him but wax unbound , would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good , and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon . And looking at life parcel-wise , in the growth of a single lot , who having a practiced vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between events , and false conceit of means whereby sequences may be compelled -- like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of distance , seeing that which is afar off as if it were within a step or a grasp -- precipitates the mistaken soul on destruction ? It was half-past ten in the morning when Gwendolen Harleth , after her gloomy journey from Leubronn , arrived at the station from which she must drive to Offendene . No carriage or friend was awaiting her , for in the telegram she had sent from Dover she had mentioned a later train , and in her impatience of lingering at a London station she had set off without picturing what it would be to arrive unannounced at half an hour 's drive from home -- at one of those stations which have been fixed on not as near anywhere , but as equidistant from everywhere . Deposited as a _ femme sole _ with her large trunks , and having to wait while a vehicle was being got from the large-sized lantern called the Railway Inn , Gwendolen felt that the dirty paint in the waiting-room , the dusty decanter of flat water , and the texts in large letters calling on her to repent and be converted , were part of the dreary prospect opened by her family troubles ; and she hurried away to the outer door looking toward the lane and fields . But here the very gleams of sunshine seemed melancholy , for the autumnal leaves and grass were shivering , and the wind was turning up the feathers of a cock and two croaking hens which had doubtless parted with their grown-up offspring and did not know what to do with themselves .