one o’clock
She wore two crucifixes , which got themselves entangled in a heavy gold chain upon her breast , and seemed to Mary expressive of her mental ambiguity . Only her vast enthusiasm and her worship of Miss Markham , one of the pioneers of the society , kept her in her place , for which she had no sound qualification . So the morning wore on , and the pile of letters grew , and Mary felt , at last , that she was the center ganglion of a very fine network of nerves which fell over England , and one of these days , when she touched the heart of the system , would begin feeling and rushing together and emitting their splendid blaze of revolutionary fireworks -- for some such metaphor represents what she felt about her work , when her brain had been heated by three hours of application . Shortly before one o'clock Mr. Clacton and Mrs. Seal desisted from their labors , and the old joke about luncheon , which came out regularly at this hour , was repeated with scarcely any variation of words . Mr. Clacton patronized a vegetarian restaurant ; Mrs. Seal brought sandwiches , which she ate beneath the plane-trees in Russell Square ; while Mary generally went to a gaudy establishment , upholstered in red plush , near by , where , much to the vegetarian 's disapproval , you could buy steak , two inches thick , or a roast section of fowl , swimming in a pewter dish . `` The bare branches against the sky do one so much GOOD , '' Mrs. Seal asserted , looking out into the Square . `` But one ca n't lunch off trees , Sally , '' said Mary .