two o'clock in the afternoon
It was his boast that he had never done anything for the first time without ascertaining precisely how it had been done by the highest authority before him . Devoid of even the rudiments of an imagination , he had never been visited in a nightmare by the suspicion that the name of Culpeper was not the best result of the best of all possible worlds . As long as his prejudices were not offended his generosity was inexhaustible . For the rest , he bore his social position as reverently as if it were a plate in church , had never spoken a profane word or recognized a joke in his life , and still dined at two o'clock in the afternoon because his grandfather , who was dyspeptic by constitution , had been unable to digest a late dinner . At the time of his marriage , an unusually happy one , he was regarded as `` the handsomest man of his day '' ; and he was still yearned over from a distance by elderly ladies of suppressed romantic temperaments . Mrs. Culpeper , a small imperious woman of distinguished lineage and uncertain temper , had gone through an entire life seeing only one thing at a time , and never seeing that one thing as it really was . If her husband embodied the moral purpose , she herself was an incarnation of the evasive idealism of the nineteenth century .