Queed looked at the floor. The sight of Fifi affected him most curiously to-day. He felt strangely ill at ease with her, only the more so because she was so amazingly at home with him. She wore her reddish-brown hair not rounded up in front as of old, but parted smoothly in the middle, and this only emphasized the almost saintly purity of her wasted little face. Her buoyant serenity puzzled and disconcerted him.
Meantime Fifi was examining Queed carefully. "You've been doing something to yourself, Mr. Queed! What is it? Why, you look ten times better than even four weeks ago!"
"I think," he said drearily, "it must be Klinker's Exercises. I give them," broke from him, "one hour and twenty minutes a day!"
But he pulled himself together, conscientiously determined to take the cheery view with Fifi.
"It is an extraordinary thing, but I am feeling better, physically and mentally, than I ever felt before, and this though I never had a really sick day in my life. It must be the exercises, for that is the only change I have made in my habits. Yet I never supposed that exercise had any such practical value as that. However," he went on slowly, "I am beginning to believe that there are several things in this world that I do not understand."
Here, indeed, was a most humiliating, an epoch-making, confession to come from the little Doctor. It was accompanied with a vague smile, intended to be cheering and just the thing for a sick-room. But the dominant note in this smile was bewildered and depressed helplessness, and at it the maternal instinct sprang full-grown in Fifi's thin little bosom. A passionate wish to mother the little Doctor tugged at her heart.
"You know what you need, Mr. Queed? Friends—lots of good friends—"
He winced as from a blow. "I assure you—"
"Yes—you—DO!" said Fifi, with surprising emphasis for so weak a little voice. "You need first a good girl friend, one lots older and better than me—one just like Sharlee. O if only you and she would be friends!—she'd be the very best in the world! And then you need men friends, plenty of them, and to go around with them, and everything. You ought to like men more, Mr. Queed! You ought to learn to be like them, and—"
"Be like them!" he interrupted, "I am like them. Why," he conceded generously, "I am one of them."