midnight
He felt that they should know about it . Despite the fact that he knew everything that his textbooks could tell him about sex and copulation he still had the quaint notion that the reason why Judge Carter and his wife were childless was because they had not yet gotten around to Doing It . He made no attempt to correlate this oddity with its opposite in Jake Caslow 's ladies of the night who seemed to go on their merry way without conceiving . He remembered the joking parry-and-thrust of that midnight talk between Tim Fisher and Janet Bagley but it made no sense to him still . But as he pondered the multitude of puzzlements , some of the answers fell partly into place just as some of the matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle may lie close to one another when they are dumped out of the box . Very dimly James began to realize that this sort of thing was not New , but to the contrary it had been going on for a long , long time . So long in fact that neither Tim Fisher nor Janet Bagley had found it necessary to state desire and raise objection respectively in simple clear sentences containing subject , verb , and object .