midnight
The careless first impulse of his affection would wane , he knew -- it were as useless to regret the inevitable passing of the spring -- but beyond this was it not possible that Laura might hold his interest by qualities more permanent than any transient exaltation of the emotions ? He thought of the soul in her face rather than of the mere changing accident of form -- of the smile which moved like an edge of light across her eyes and lips -- and this rare spiritual quality in her appearance appealed to him at the instant as vividly as it had done on the first day he saw her . This charm of strangeness had worn with him as nothing in the domain of the sensations had worn in his life before . In the smoking car , when he entered it a little later , he found a man named Barclay , whom he saw sometimes at his club ; and they sat talking together until long after midnight . Barclay was a keen , aggressively energetic person , who lived in a continual rush of affairs , which had not kept him from a decided over-development about the waist . He was married to an invalid wife , who , as he now told Kemper , was threatened with consumption and condemned to spend the whole year in the Adirondacks . Kemper had seen her once , and though she was neither pretty nor intelligent , he remembered her with respect as the owner of a property of forty millions .