“Bombo?” I echoed. “You call this Bombo? You don’t know how remarkable that is, but that’s because you don’t know Aunt Carola, who is very remarkable, too. Well, never mind her now. Point is, it’s always a triangle.”
“I haven’t a doubt of it,” he replied.
“There you’re right. And so was your uncle. He knew. Triangle.” Here I found myself nodding portentously at John, and beating the table with my finger very solemnly.
He stood by his window seeming to wait for me. And now everything in the universe grew perfectly clear to me; I rose on mastering tides of thought, and all problems lay disposed of at my feet, while delicious strength and calm floated in my brain and being. Nothing was difficult for me. But I was getting away from the triangle, and there was John waiting at the window, and I mustn’t say too much, mustn’t say too much. My will reached out and caught the triangle and brought it close, and I saw it all perfectly clear again.
“What are they all,” I said, “the old romances? You take Paris and Helen and Menelaus. What’s that? You take Launcelot and Arthur and Guinevere. You take Paola and Francesca and her husband, what’s-his-name, or Tristram and Iseult and Mark. Two men, one woman. Triangle and trouble. Other way around you get Tannhauser and Venus and Elizabeth; two women, one man; more triangle and more trouble. Yes.” And I nodded at him again. The tide of my thought was pulling me hard away from this to other important world-problems, but my will held, struggling, and I kept to it.
“You wait,” I told him. “I know what I mean. Trouble is, so hard to advise him right.”
“Advise who right?” inquired John Mayrant.
It helped me wonderfully. My will gripped my floating thoughts and held them to it. “Friend of mine in trouble; though why he asks me when I’m not married—I’d be married now, you know, but afraid of only one wife. Man doesn’t love twice; loves thrice, four, six, lots of times; but they say only one wife. Ought to be two, anyhow. Much easier for man to marry then.”
“Wouldn’t it be rather immoral?” John asked.
“Morality is queer thing. Like kaleidoscope. New patterns all the time. Abraham and wives—perfectly respectable. You take Pharaohs—or kings of that sort—married own sisters. All right then. Perfectly horrible now, of course. But you ask men about two wives. They’d say something to be said for that idea. Only there are the women, you know. They’d never. But I’m going to tell my friend he’s doing wrong. Going to write him to-night. Where’s ink?”