three o'clock in the morning
We had come in by the back door and made our way through the rather arid cleanliness of the houses ' administrative departments , flavoured with a smell that combined more notably the odours of cooking and plate-polish . The transition as we emerged through the red baize door under the majestic panoply of the staircase , was quite startling . It was like passing from the desolate sanitation of a well-kept workhouse straight into the lighted auditorium of a theatre . That contrast dramatised , for me , the Jervaises ' tremendous ideal of the barrier between owner and servant ; but it had , also , another effect which may have been due to the fact that it was , now , three o'clock in the morning . For just at the moment of our transition I had the queerest sense not only of having passed at some previous time through a precisely similar experience , but , also , of taking part in a ridiculous dream . At that instant Jervaise Hall , its owners , dependants and friends , had the air of being not realities but symbols pushed up into my thought by some prank of the fantastic psyche who dwells in the subconscious . I should not have been surprised at any incongruity in the brief passing of that illusion .