three o'clock in the morning
Unlimited sodas , three pipes smoked silently over Delphine Demirep 's last novel , a bath well dashed with eau de cologne , and some glasses of Anisette after the fatigue-duty of unharnessing , restored him a little ; but he was still weary and depressed into gentler languor than ever through all the courses at a dinner party at the Austrian Embassy , and did not recover his dejection at a reception of the Duchess of Lydiard-Tregoze , where the prettiest French Countess of her time asked him if anything was the matter . `` Yes ! '' said Bertie with a sigh , and a profound melancholy in what the woman called his handsome Spanish eyes , `` I have had a great misfortune ; we have been on duty all day ! '' He did not thoroughly recover tone , light and careless though his temper was , till the Zu-Zu , in her diamond-edition of a villa , prescribed Crème de Bouzy and Parfait Amour in succession , with a considerable amount of pine-apple ice at three o'clock in the morning , which restorative prescription succeeded . Indeed , it took something as tremendous as divorce from all forms of smoking for five hours to make an impression on Bertie . He had the most serene insouciance that ever a man was blessed with ; in worry he did not believe -- he never let it come near him ; and beyond a little difficulty sometimes in separating too many entangled rose-chins caught round him at the same time , and the annoyance of a miscalculation on the flat , or the ridge-and-furrow , when a Maldon or Danebury favorite came nowhere , or his book was wrong for the Grand National , Cecil had no cares of any sort or description . True , the Royallieu Peerage , one of the most ancient and almost one of the most impoverished in the kingdom , could ill afford to maintain its sons in the expensive career on which it had launched them , and the chief there was to spare usually went between the eldest son , a Secretary of Legation in that costly and charming City of Vienna , and the young one , Berkeley , through the old Viscount 's partiality ; so that , had Bertie ever gone so far as to study his actual position , he would have probably confessed that it was , to say the least , awkward ; but then he never did this , certainly never did it thoroughly .