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 Bohème?" suggested Steingall.

"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."