fingers; Quinny, the illustrator, long and gaunt, with a predatory eloquence that charged irresistibly down on any subject, cut it off, surrounded it, and raked it with enfilading wit and satire; and Peters, whose methods of existence were a mystery, a young man of fifty, who had done nothing and who knew every one by his first name, the club postman, who carried the tittle-tattle, the bon mots and the news of the day, who drew up a petition a week and pursued the house committee with a daily grievance.

About the latticed porch, which ran around the sanded yard with its feeble fountain and futile evergreens, other groups were eying one another, or engaging in desultory conversation, oppressed with the heaviness of the night.

At the round table, Quinny alone, absorbing energy as he devoured the conversation, having routed Steingall on the Germans and archaeology and Rankin on the origins of the Lord’s Prayer, had seized a chance remark of De Gollyer’s to say: 

“There are only half a dozen stories in the world.  Like everything that’s true it isn’t true.”  He waved his long, gouty fingers in the direction of Steingall, who, having been silenced, was regarding him with a look of sleepy indifference.  “What is more to the point, is the small number of human relations that are so simple and yet so fundamental that they can be eternally played upon, redressed, and reinterpreted in every language, in every age, and yet remain inexhaustible in the possibility of variations.”

“By George, that is so,” said Steingall, waking up.  “Every art does go back to three or four notes.  In composition it is the same thing.  Nothing new—­nothing new since a thousand years.  By George, that is true!  We invent nothing, nothing!”

“Take the eternal triangle,” said Quinny hurriedly, not to surrender his advantage, while Rankin and De Gollyer in a bored way continued to gaze dreamily at a vagrant star or two.  “Two men and a woman, or two women and a man.  Obviously it should be classified as the first of the great original parent themes.  Its variations extend into the thousands.  By the way, Rankin, excellent opportunity, eh, for some of our modern, painstaking, unemployed jackasses to analyze and classify.”

“Quite right,” said Rankin without perceiving the satirical note.  “Now there’s De Maupassant’s Fort comma la Mort—­quite the most interesting variation—­shows the turn a genius can give.  There the triangle is the man of middle age, the mother he has loved in his youth and the daughter he comes to love.  It forms, you might say, the head of a whole subdivision of modern continental literature.”

“Quite wrong, Rankin, quite wrong,” said Quinny, who would have stated the other side quite as imperiously.  “What you cite is a variation of quite another theme, the Faust theme—­old age longing for youth, the man who has loved longing for the love of his youth, which is youth itself.  The triangle is the theme of jealousy, the most destructive and, therefore, the most dramatic of human passions.  The Faust theme is the most fundamental and inevitable of all human experiences, the tragedy of life itself.  Quite a different thing.”