They went into the back room, and over the Spartan fare continued to discuss aspects of fiction.
'I shall never,' said Biffen, 'write anything like a dramatic scene.
Such things do happen in life, but so very rarely that they are nothing to my purpose.

Even when they happen, by-the-bye, it is in a shape that would be useless to the ordinary novelist; he would have to cut away this circumstance, and add that.

Why?
I should like to know.

Such conventionalism results from stage necessities.

Fiction hasn't yet outgrown the influence of the stage on which it originated.