What's going on?" I whispered to Gina. "Management is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt they don't have enough to do," she murmured back. "So they'v… - Connie Willis

Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.

It’s the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.

The continuum had somehow managed to correct the incongruity, pairing off lovers like the last act of a Shakespearean comedy, though just how it had managed it wasn’t clear. What was clear was that it had wanted us out of the way while it was doing whatever it was doing. So it had done the time-travel equivalent of locking us in our rooms.