about eleven o'clock
Happily there is as little need as temptation to give any description of it , with its sheets of glass and steel , its lace curtains , crude-colored walls and floor and couches , and glittering chandeliers of a thousand prisms . Everybody knows the kind of room -- a huddle of the chimera ambition wallowing in the chaos of the commonplace -- no miniature world of harmonious abiding . The only interesting thing in it was , that on all sides were doors , which must lead out of it , and might lead to a better place . It was about eleven o'clock of a November morning -- more like one in March . There might be a thick fog before the evening , but now the sun was shining like a brilliant lump of ice -- so inimical to heat , apparently , that a servant had just dropped the venetian blind of one of the windows to shut his basilisk-gaze from the sickening fire , which was now rapidly recovering . Betwixt the cold sun and the hard earth , a dust-befogged wind , plainly borrowed from March , was sweeping the street . Mr. and Mrs. Redmain had returned to town thus early because their country-place was in Cornwall , and there Mr. Redmain was too far from his physician .