five o'clock
The more mischievous fable was refuted before very long , but only when it had borne results for Wilfrid practically the same as if it had been a truth . Let time and change do their work for six years and six months , their building and their destroying , their ripening for love , their ripening for death . Then we take our way to the Capital , for , behold , it is mid-season ; the sun of late June is warm upon the many-charioted streets , upon the parks where fashion 's progress circles to the ` Io Triumphe ' of regardant throngs , even upon the quarters where life knows but one perennial season , that of toil . The air is voiceful ; every house which boasts a drawing-room gathers its five o'clock choir ; every theatre , every concert-room resounds beneath the summer night ; in the halls of Westminster is the culmination of sustained utterance . There , last night , the young member for a Surrey borough made his maiden speech ; his name , Mr. Wilfrid Athel . The speech was better reported than such are wont to be , for it contained clever things , and quite surprisingly resembled in its tone of easy confidence and its mastery of relevant facts the deliverances of men of weight in politics . It had elicited a compliment from a leader of the opposing party ; it had occasioned raisings of the eyebrows in capable judges , and had led to remarks that a young man so singularly self-possessed , so agreeably oracular , so remarkably long-headed , might be expected , in the course of some five-and-twenty years , to go far .