midnight
Another day , perhaps , when I 've got a little whiskey inside me . It 's too funny for words . '' `` You ought n't to go tickling young girls , Charlie . It 's not polite , at your age ... '' They all cleared out , as it seemed , after midnight ; some on all fours , many of them fairly perpendicular . But when the serving lad entered the premises in the sober light of morning , to clear up the debris , he was surprised to perceive a human form reclining under a table . It was the young Norwegian professor . He lay there wide awake , with disheveled hair and an inspired gleam in his eye , tracing on the floor , with the point of a corkscrew , what looked like a tangle of parallelograms and conic sections .