"But it's 1953."
"Now it's you who are joking."
"But the paper's yellow."
"The paper's always yellow."
He laughed uneasily. "Well, if you actually think it's 1933, perhaps you're to be envied," he said, with a sardonic humor he didn't quite feel. "Then you can't know anything about the Second World War, or television, or the V-2s, or Bikini bathing suits, or the atomic bomb, or—"
"Stop!" She had sprung up and retreated around her chair, white-faced. "I don't like what you're saying."
"But—"
"No, please! Jokes that may be quite harmless on the mainland sound different here."
"I'm really not joking," he said after a moment.
She grew quite frantic at that. "I can show you all last week's papers! I can show you magazines and other things. I can prove it!"