She did. 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." A yawn. "Take another regalia."
David Marshall had forgotten everything but his main points and the facts that supported them. He began in the very midst of things. He spoke a minute and a quarter—plainly, simply; and sat down the instant he had finished.
He had spoken in his usual husky and sibilant voice. Nobody had called
"Louder!" however—because nobody had really wished to hear.
On his ending, the room rang with applause—the applause of gratitude, largely.
"Well, the old fellow can say his say, after all, eh? And no blooming oratory, either."
"And sense enough to cut it short—the last man usually shows the least mercy."
As Marshall sat down his neighbor on the right shook his hand warmly.
"Why haven't you been doing this for us before?"