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.

"I shall take up your contention," said Quinny without pause for breath,
"first, because you have opened up one of my pet topics, and, second,
because it gives me a chance to talk." He gave a sidelong glance at
Steingall and winked at De Gollyer. "What is the peculiar fascination
that the detective problem exercises over the human mind? You will say
curiosity. Yes and no. Admit at once that the whole art of a detective
story consists in the statement of the problem. Any one can do it. I can
do it. Steingall even can do it.