"I have worked," said the man, "but what have you been doing ?" "Ah!" said Graham.

He forgot everything else, and sat down in the chair.
Within five minutes he heard himself, named, heard "when the Sleeper wakes," used jestingly as a proverb for remote postponement, and passed himself by, a thing remote and incredible.

But in a little while he knew those two people like intimate friends.
At last the miniature drama came to an end, and the square face of the apparatus was blank again.
It was a strange world into which he had been permitted to see, unscrupulous, pleasure seeking, energetic, subtle, a world too of dire economic struggle; there were allusions he did not understand, incidents that conveyed strange suggestions of altered moral ideals, flashes of dubious enlightenment.

The blue canvas that bulked so largely in his first impression of the city ways appeared again and again as the costume of the common people.

He had no doubt the story was contemporary, and its intense realism was undeniable.