about six o'clock
She had acquired the London muddiness of complexion quickly , poor child , in the semi-subterranean life she led . I was moved to inquire as to what had led her to come to London , and gathered that she had been anxious to `` see a bit o ' life . '' Certainly she saw life , of a kind , when she entered her horrible underground kitchen of a morning , for , as a chance errand once showed me , its floor was a moving carpet of black-beetles until after the gas was lighted . In Bloomsbury , Bessie 's daily work began about six o'clock -- there were four stories in the house , and coals and food and water required upon every floor -- and ended some seventeen hours later . Occasionally , an exacting lodger would make it eighteen hours -- the number of Bessie 's years in the world -- but seventeen was the normal . The trains which every day came rushing in from the country to the various railway termini of London were almost past counting . The `` rural exodus , '' as it was called , was a sadly real movement then .