at the Astor Library. It read:
SILENCE
Arch-type and model of courteous warning!
When Fifi read the little Doctor's sign, her feelings were not in the
least wounded, insufficiently subtle though some particular people might
have thought its admonition to be. On the contrary, it was only by the
promptest work in getting her handkerchief into her mouth that she
avoided laughing out loud. The two of them alone in the room and his
_Silence_ sign gazing at her like a pasteboard Gorgon!
Fifi became more than ever interested in Mr. Queed. An intense and
strictly feminine curiosity filled her soul to know something of the
nature of that work which demanded so stern a noiselessness. Observing
rigorously the printed Rule of the Dining-Room, she could not forbear to
pilfer glance after glance at the promulgator of it. Mr. Queed was
writing, not reading, to-night. He wrote very slowly on half-size yellow
pads, worth seventy-five cents a dozen, using the books only for
reference. Now he tore off a sheet only partly filled with his small
handwriting, and at the head of a new sheet inscribed a Roman numeral,
with a single word under that. Like her cousin Sharlee at an earlier
date, Fifi experienced a desire to study out, upside down, what this
heading was. Several peeks were needed, with artful attention to algebra
between whiles, before she was at last convinced that she had it.
Undoubtedly it was
XVIII
ALTRUISM
There was nothing enormous about Fifi's vocabulary, but she well knew
what to do in a case like this. Behind her stood a battered little
walnut bookcase, containing the Paynter library. After a safe interval
of absorption in her sums, she pushed back her chair with the most
respectful quietude and pulled out a tall volume. The pages of it she
turned with blank studious face but considerable inner expectancy:
Af--Ai--Al--Alf....
A giggle shattered the academic calm, and Fifi, in horror, realized that
she was the author of it. She looked up quickly, and her worst fears
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