Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SCOURGE OF THE RED CORD Fabia came to England as had been arranged, and was received by Mrs. Paul Seaton with open arms: but Miss Vipart had not been long at Prince's Gardens before Isabel realised that she had opened her arms a little too wide before understanding all the bearings of the case. She at once confided the discovery of this error, and her repentance of the same, to Paul, who, like a good husband (and unlike a good wife), carefully refrained from saying anything which, even by the freest translation, could be construed into " I told you so." He was for sending Fabia back to India by return of post, so to speak, having (again like a good husband) no sense of proportion where his wife and his wife's interests were concerned. The man who is alive to the laws of perspective with regard to the woman that he loves, had better take at once a self-imposed vow of celibacy: for while the world stands he will never make a passable husband. But Isabel—with that innate sense of justice in which it pleases men to imagine that all women are fundamentally lacking—felt that such a course of conduct would be most unfair to her guest: and put the temptation away from her accordingly. It was not really the fault of either woman that the two did not, as the phrase runs, get on well together: they met with the full intention of liking each other extremely, and of being great friends as the fashionable world counts friendTHE SUBJECTION OF ISABEL CARNABY ship: but the fact was that they were absolutely incapable of understanding one another: and true friendship without mutual comprehension is a contradiction in terms. It was no fault of Isabel's that in spite of all the efforts to understand Fabia's character, she signally failed; on the contrary, this failure w...