“Tom, oh Tom! you Tom!” called John Mayrant; and after the man had come from the kitchen:  “You may put the punch-bowl and things on the table, and clear away and go to bed.  My Great-uncle Marston Chartain,” he continued to me, “was of eccentric taste, and for the last twenty years of his life never had anybody to dinner but the undertaker.”  He paused at this point to mix the punch, and then resumed:  “But for all that, he appears to have been a lively old gentleman to the end, and left us his version of a saying which is considered by some people an improvement on the original, ‘Cherchez la femme.’  Uncle Marston had it, ’Hunt the other woman.’  Don’t go too fast with that punch; it isn’t as gentle as it seems.”

But John and his Uncle Marston had between them given me my beginning, and, as I sat sipping my punch, I ceased to hear the anecdotes which followed.  I sat sipping and smoking, and was presently aware of the deepening silence of the night, and of John no longer at the table, but by the window, looking out into the forest, and muttering once more, “Oh, the times, the times!”

“It’s always a triangle,” I began.

He turned round from his window.  “Triangle?” He looked at my glass of punch, and then at me.  “Go easy with the Bombo,” he repeated.

“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.”