h
as I found her after Cary and Aubrey had set a trap to make me see her
in her true light. They were obliged to set a trap, for my loyalty is
of the blind, stupid sort, which will not be convinced, and all the
arguments in the world would only have made me more ardently champion
her as a friend.

You could not call Cary athletic, because she did not go in for
out-of-door sports to the exclusion of the gentler forms of amusement.
But whatever she did, she did so well that you would think she had
given most of her time to the mastering of that one accomplishment.
But here is where her cleverness showed most. It was not that she
really did everything, and did it perfectly. It was that she never
attempted anything which she had not mastered. For example, she never
played whist, because she had no memory, no finesse, and because she
played games of chance so much better. She could never settle herself
down to a multitude of details, but she could plan and execute a coup
of such brilliancy that it would make your hair stand on end. Such was
Cary Farquhar, and her most successful coup was the way she compelled
me to see Flora Forsyth in her true colours.

Sometimes I think I am quite clever. Again I think I am a perfect
fool. And the agains come oftener than the sometimes.

I would enjoy making a continuous narrative of this story, as I could
if I were writing a book, but this is a record of real life, and real
life does not happen in finished chapters. If you try to make it, you
either have to leave out a bit, or go back and repeat something.

Thus, in telling this story of Flora, if I told the perfect faith I had
in her at first and of how utterly I came to know and despise her
afterward, I should show to everybody the fool I made of myself, and
that exhibition I prefer to keep as much to myself as possible. The
Angel knows it, and that is bad enough. So that is why I must make a
hodge-podge of it, telling a bit here and a bit there, just as things
happened, and pretending that I saw through her from the first--which,
however, I didn't.

But, in order to give some idea of her methods, which are of interest
as a human document, I must set down faithfully how I came to be drawn
into this love-story, and how the Angel and Cary pulled me out.

This is the very beginning of it.

If you knew our best man, you probably would not be surprised to make
the discovery that I made--to wit: that two girls were in love