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 were realized.  Mr. Queed was staring at her, as one scarcely able to credit his own senses, icy rebuke piercing through and overflowing his great round spectacles.

“I beg your pardon!—­Mr. Queed.  It—­it slipped out, really—­”

But the young man thought that the time had come when this question of noise in his dining-room must be settled once and for all.

“Indeed?  Be kind enough to explain the occasion of it.”

“Why,” said Fifi, too truthful to prevaricate and completely cowed, “it—­it was only the meaning of a word here.  It—­was silly of me.  I—­I can’t explain it—­exactly—­”

“Suppose you try.  Since your merriment interrupts my work, I claim the privilege of sharing it.”

“Well!  I—­I—­happened to see that word at the head of the page you are writing—­”

“Proceed.”

“I—­I looked it up in the dictionary.  It says,” she read out with a gulp and a cough, “it means ’self-sacrificing devotion to the interests of others.’”