midnight
The only feeling that hindered my full acceptance of the idea that I was attending a nineteenth-century show was a puzzled wonder why I should seem to know so much more than the actors appeared to about the outcome of the social revolution they were alluding to as in progress . When the curtain fell on the first scene , and I looked about and saw Edith , her mother and father , sitting about me in the music room , the realization of my actual situation came with a shock that earlier in my twentieth-century career would have set my brain swimming . But I was too firm on my new feet now for anything of that sort , and for the rest of the play the constant sense of the tremendous experience which had made me at once a contemporary of two ages so widely apart , contributed an indescribable intensity to my enjoyment of the play . After the curtain fell , we sat talking of the drama , and everything else , till the globe of the color clock , turning from bottle-green to white , warned us of midnight , when the ladies left the doctor and myself to our own devices . `` It is pretty late , '' I said , `` but I want very much to ask you just a few more questions about the Revolution . All that I have learned leaves me quite as puzzled as ever to imagine any set of practical measures by which the substitution of public for private capitalism could have been effected without a prodigious shock . We had in our day engineers clever enough to move great buildings from one site to another , keeping them meanwhile so steady and upright as not to interfere with the dwellers in them , or to cause an interruption of the domestic operations .