midnight
She prepared a long address after the most approved rhetorical models : a flowing introduction which walked all around the subject before going into it ; a telling peroration whose emphatic periods seemed to render any subsequent consideration of the matter a mere piece of futility ; and in between , briefly and cursorily , the one or two vital points of the whole discourse . Thus equipped , David Marshall was to rise at half an hour before midnight , the last but one of a long line of speakers , to claim the attention of a great roomful of men sated with meat and drink and sodden with oratory . But in the cloak-room the manuscript had slipped from his pocket , and at the table all its overwrought periods had slipped from his mind . And at midnight he rose to confront an expanse of disordered table-cloths and an array of wearied faces , his own ace full of uncertainty , and nothing to nerve his inexperience save a desperate determination not to disappoint his daughter . `` Another old bore getting up '' -- from a distant corner of the smoky room . `` Any idea who he is ? '' `` Not the slightest . ''