a quarter to ten
The telephone-bell had silenced everything . The telephone-bell had grown from a dream into a nightmare ; and at last he had said to himself in the nightmare : ` I might just as well be up and working as lying throttled here by this confounded nightmare . ' And by an effort of will he had wakened . And even after he was roused , and had switched on the light , which showed the hands of the clock at a quarter to ten , he could still hear the telephone-bell of his nightmare . And then the truth occurred to him , as the truth does occur surprisingly to people whose sleep has been disturbed , that the telephone-bell was a real telephone-bell , and not in the least the telephone-bell of a dream , and it was ringing , ringing , ringing in the dome . There were fifteen lines of telephone in the Hugo building , and one of them ran to the dome . Few persons called him up on it , because few persons knew its precise number , but he used it considerably himself .