and setting up the present one."

This was indeed interesting information to me, but when I began to
question Edith further, she sighed and shook her head.

"Having tried to show my superior knowledge, I must now confess my
ignorance. All I know is the bare fact that the revolutionary movement
began, as I said, very soon after you fell asleep. Father must tell you
the rest. I might as well admit while I am about it, for you would soon
find it out, that I know almost nothing either as to the Revolution or
nineteenth-century matters generally. You have no idea how hard I have
been trying to post myself on the subject so as to be able to talk
intelligently with you, but I fear it is of no use. I could not
understand it in school and can not seem to understand it any better now.
More than ever this morning I am sure that I never shall. Since you have
been telling me how the old world appeared to you in that dream, your
talk has brought those days so terribly near that I can almost see them,
and yet I can not say that they seem a bit more intelligible than
before."

"Things were bad enough and black enough certainly," I said; "but I don't
see what there was particularly unintelligible about them. What is the
difficulty?"

"The main difficulty comes from the complete lack of agreement between
the pretensions of your contemporaries about the way their society was
organized and the actual facts as given in the histories."

"For example?" I queried.