at the Alhambra with
Gwendolyn ... nor.... Please sir, just a copper, I am old and lame."

"Cheer up," encouraged Gud, "I feel it my duty to help you. Was this
triangle that seemed to have been the life of your business equilateral
or isosceles?"

"Neither," replied the beggar, now with the bearing of a true novelist,
"it was the eternal triangle which is a plot of a certain very literary
relation of the sexes, in which three individuals form the angles."

"Why just three?" asked Gud.

"It seems that three sell best," said the novelist. "Two do not interest
the reader, and four, five or more tire him; three characters sell best,
which is why such a triangle is called eternal."

"I understand that three elements make the best triangle--and one
shouldn't fool too much with mathematics. But what about these sexes?"

"It makes no difference," replied the beggar, "how the sexes are
arranged, just so both sexes are represented on the triangle."

"Both sexes," repeated Gud--"then you only have two sexes?"

"Certainly, three characters of two sexes form the eternal triangle, any
way you arrange them; isn't that perfectly simple?"

"It is simple, more simple than perfect. Now, pick up the coins you cast
into the gutter and buy yourself a pencil and a pad and start to work.
You will find eternal triangles have become as plentiful as lies, and
what is more important, perfectly moral."

"You speak," replied the novelist, "with authority, and my understanding
will come, no doubt, with inspiration. I thank you sir, especially for
your hopeful words about the possibilities of fiction becoming moral.
You can not realize how the necessity of dealing with immorality wears
on the conscience of a novelist; nor how those hypocritical critics
revile us by insinuating that we write of immorality because we live it.
We write of it, sir, because the editors and the public demand it, and
for no other reason. If immorality in fiction were not profitable we
would not write at all. Again I thank you sir, and good day to you."

Chapter XXV

As Gud and the Underdog walked on their way, they passed through a dark
valley where they could hardly see in the murkiness to keep their feet
on the Impossible Curve, and so they proceeded slowly with eyes and ears
alert.

Presently Fidu stopped and cocked his ear, for his sense of hearing was
more acute than his master's. When Gud refused to stop, Fidu ran on for
a time, and then he stopp