Rankin, who never agreed with Quinny unless Quinny maliciously took advantage of his prior announcement to agree with him, continued to combat this idea.

“You believe then,” said De Gollyer after a certain moment had been consumed in hair splitting, “that the origin of all dramatic themes is simply the expression of some human emotion.  In other words, there can exist no more parent themes than there are human emotions.”

“I thank you, sir, very well put,” said Quinny with a generous wave of his hand.  “Why is the Three Musketeers a basic theme?  Simply the interpretation of comradeship, the emotion one man feels for another, vital because it is the one peculiarly masculine emotion.  Look at Du Maurier and Trilby, Kipling in Soldiers Three—­simply the Three Musketeers.”

“The Vie de Boheme?” suggested Steingall.

“In the real Vie de Boheme, yes,” said Quinny viciously.  “Not in the concocted sentimentalities that we now have served up to us by athletic tenors and consumptive elephants!”

Rankin, who had been silently deliberating on what had been left behind, now said cunningly and with evident purpose: 

“All the same, I don’t agree with you men at all.  I believe there are situations, original situations, that are independent of your human emotions, that exist just because they are situations, accidental and nothing else.”

“As for instance?” said Quinny, preparing to attack.

“Well, I’ll just cite an ordinary one that happens to come to my mind,” said Rankin, who had carefully selected his test.  “In a group of seven or eight, such as we are here, a theft takes place; one man is the thief—­which one?  I’d like to know what emotion that interprets, and yet it certainly is an original theme, at the bottom of a whole literature.”

This challenge was like a bomb.

“Not the same thing.”

“Detective stories, bah!”

“Oh, I say, Rankin, that’s literary melodrama.”

Rankin, satisfied, smiled and winked victoriously over to Tommers, who was listening from an adjacent table.

“Of course your suggestion is out of order, my dear man, to this extent,” said Quinny, who never surrendered, “in that I am talking of fundamentals and you are citing details.  Nevertheless, I could answer that the situation you give, as well as the whole school it belongs to, can be traced back to the commonest of human emotions, curiosity; and that the story of Bluebeard and the Moonstone are to all purposes identically the same.”

At this Steingall, who had waited hopefully, gasped and made as though to leave the table.