ten at night
It was by no means easy to meet her in society either , for , in spite of recent social developments , Prince Chiaromonte still clung to the antiquated political mythology of Blacks and Whites , and strictly avoided the families he persisted in calling ` Liberals , ' on the ground that his father had called them so in 1870 , when he was a small boy . It was not until he had bored himself to extinction in the conscientious effort to take the girl out , that he appealed to his sister-in-law to help him , though he knew that neither she nor his brother was truly clerical at heart . Even then , if it had been clear to him that Giovanni Severi had made up his mind to marry Angela if he married at all , the Prince would have forced himself to bear agonies of boredom night after night , rather than entrust his daughter to the Marchesa ; but such an idea had never entered his head , and he would have scouted the suggestion that Angela would ever dare to encourage a young man of whom he had not formally approved ; and while she was meeting Giovanni almost daily , and dancing with him almost every evening , her father was slowly negotiating an appropriate marriage for her with the eldest son of certain friends who were almost as clerical and intransigent as himself . The young man was a limp degenerate , with a pale face , a weak mouth , and an inherited form of debility which made him fall asleep wherever he was , if nothing especial happened to keep his eyes open ; he not only always slept from ten at night till nine the next morning with the regularity of an idiot , but he went to sleep wherever he sat down , in church , at dinner , and even when he was driving . Neither his own parents nor Prince Chiaromonte looked upon this as a serious drawback in the matter of marriage . A man who slept all day and all night was a man out of mischief , not likely to grumble nor to make love to his neighbour 's wife ; he would therefore be a model husband . When he fell asleep in the drawing-room in summer , his consort would sit beside him and brush away the flies ; in winter she would be careful to cover him up lest he should catch cold ; at mass she could prick him with a hat-pin to keep him awake ; as for the rest , she would bear one of the oldest names in Europe , her husband would be a strictly religious and moral person , and she would be very rich .