She must--
Here she reached her room door and was about to enter, when at a
sudden thought she paused and let her eyes wander down the hall,
till they settled on another door, the one she had closed behind
her the night before, with the deep resolve never to open it again
except under compulsion.
Had the compulsion arisen? Evidently, for a few minutes later she
was standing in one of the dim corners of Oliver's musty room,
reopening a book which she had taken down from the shelves on her
former visit. She remembered it from its torn back and the fact
that it was an Algebra. Turning to the fly leaf, she looked again
at the names and schoolboy phrases she had seen scribbled all over
its surface, for the one which she remembered as, I HATE ALGEBRA.
It had not been a very clearly written ALGEBRA, and she would
never have given this interpretation to the scrawl, had she been
in a better mood. Now another thought had come to her, and she
wanted to see the word again. Was she glad or sorry to have
yielded to this impulse, when by a closer inspection she perceived
that the word was not ALGEBRA at all, but ALGERNON, I HATE A
ETHERIDGE.--I HATE A. E.--I HATE ALGERNON E. all over the page,
and here and there on other pages, sometimes in characters so
rubbed and faint as to be almost unreadable and again so pressed
into the paper by a vicious pencil-point as to have broken their
way through to the leaf underneath.
The work of an ill-conditioned schoolboy! but--this hate dated
back many years.
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