"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.'"
The poor child thought her point must now be indelicately plain, but the lips of Doctor Queed merely emitted another close-clipped: "Proceed."
At a desperate loss as she was, Fifi was suddenly visited by an idea. "Oh! I see. You're—you're writing against altruism, aren't you?"
"What leads you to that conclusion, if I may ask?"
"Why—I—I suppose it's the—way you—you do. Of course I oughtn't to have said it—"
"Go on. What way that I do?"
Poor Fifi saw that she was floundering in ever more deeply. With the boldness of despair she blurted out: "Well—one thing—you sent me out of the room that night—when I coughed, you know. I—I don't understand about altruism like you do, but I—should think it was—my interests to stay here—"