noon
But Adam reckoned without his Eve . These things represented to him the applied power of wealth , but there slumbered in his dingy cabin an ambition that soared far above his primitive wants . Somewhere in Mrs. Garvey 's bosom still survived a spot of femininity unstarved by twenty years of Blackjack . For so long a time the sounds in her ears had been the scaly-barks dropping in the woods at noon , and the wolves singing among the rocks at night , and it was enough to have purged her of vanities . She had grown fat and sad and yellow and dull . But when the means came , she felt a rekindled desire to assume the perquisites of her sex -- to sit at tea tables ; to buy futile things ; to whitewash the hideous veracity of life with a little form and ceremony . So she coldly vetoed Pike 's proposed system of fortifications , and announced that they would descend upon the world , and gyrate socially .