"In the real Vie de Bohème, 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.