four o'clock
`` If , as I have , you also doe , Vertue attired in woman see , And dare love that , and say so too , And forget the He and She ; And if this love , though placed so , From prophane men you hide , Which will no faith on this bestow , Or , if they doe , deride : Then you have done a braver thing Than all the Worthies did , And a braver thence will spring , Which is , to keep that hid . '' -- DR. DONNE . Sir James Chettam 's mind was not fruitful in devices , but his growing anxiety to `` act on Brooke , '' once brought close to his constant belief in Dorothea 's capacity for influence , became formative , and issued in a little plan ; namely , to plead Celia 's indisposition as a reason for fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall , and to leave her at the Grange with the carriage on the way , after making her fully aware of the situation concerning the management of the estate . In this way it happened that one day near four o'clock , when Mr. Brooke and Ladislaw were seated in the library , the door opened and Mrs. Casaubon was announced . Will , the moment before , had been low in the depths of boredom , and , obliged to help Mr. Brooke in arranging `` documents '' about hanging sheep-stealers , was exemplifying the power our minds have of riding several horses at once by inwardly arranging measures towards getting a lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant residence at the Grange ; while there flitted through all these steadier images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with Homeric particularity . When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock , and felt a tingling at his finger-ends . Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion , in the adjustment of his facial muscles , in the vividness of his glance , which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch .