ten o’clock in the evening
It is both painful and satisfactory to think how often these antitheses are to be observed in the individual most open to our observation -- ourselves . We pass the evening with faces lit up by some flaring illumination or other : we get up the next morning -- the fiery jets have all gone out , and nothing confronts us but a few crinkled pipes and sooty wirework , hardly even recalling the outline of the blazing picture that arrested our eyes before bedtime . Emotions would be half starved if there were no candle-light . Probably nine-tenths of the gushing letters of indiscreet confession are written after nine or ten o'clock in the evening , and sent off before day returns to leer invidiously upon them . Few that remain open to catch our glance as we rise in the morning , survive the frigid criticism of dressing-time . The subjects uppermost in the minds of the two women who had thus cooled from their fires , were not the visionary ones of the later hours , but the hard facts of their earlier conversation . After a remark that Cytherea need not assist her in dressing unless she wished to , Miss Aldclyffe said abruptly -- ` I can tell that young man 's name . '