“That, then, is the solution you offer to my problem. But to me it does not seem solved. There the animals are. They are animals—and not bricks.” “They are animals, true, but they must be shaken and shaken together, till all their excrescences are rubbed away, and then they will fit together and find sufficiency of room. That is how marbles are made. Shapeless masses of stone are put in a bag and rattled till all their edges and angles are rattled off.” “What an ark would remain! You complain of some animals crippling others, this scheme of yours would involve a universal mutilation—the animals resolved into undistinguishable, shapeless, uninteresting trunks. The only creature that would come out scatheless would be the slug. All the rest would be levelled down to the condition of that creature—which is a digesting tube, and nothing more.” Then Arminell stood up. “It is time for me to be off,” she said; “her ladyship will be back from church, and oh! Mr. Saltren, I have interfered with the Psalms and Lessons.” CHAPTER XI. IN THE AVENUE. According to the classic story, the Sphinx demanded of all who visited her the solution of an enigma—and that enigma was _Man_. Suddenly, unexpectedly, on a quiet ordinary Sunday morning, Arminell, a young girl without experience, had been confronted with the Sphinx, and set the same enigma, an enigma involving others, like the perforated Chinese puzzle-balls, an enigma that has been essayed and answered repeatedly, yet always remains insoluble, that, as it has assumed fresh aspects, has developed new perplexities. Arminell had been wearied with the routine and restraint of social life, its commonplace duties and conventionalities, and had been fired with that generous though mistaken dislike to the insincerities and formalities of civilisation, so often found among the young—generous, because bred of truth; mistaken, because it ignores the fact that the insincerities impose on no one, and the formalities are made of mutual compromises, such as render life, social life, possible. Arminell was in this rebellious mood, when she was brought face to face with a problem beyond her powers to unravel. She might as well, with a rudimentary knowledge of algebraic symbols, have been set to work out Euler’s proof of the Binomial Theorem. She was like Fatima when she opened Blue-Beard’s secret chamber, and saw in it an array of victims. Of these victims disclosed to her, one was Jingles, another Patience Kite; then came Captain Saltren and his wife; and next hung in the dismal cabinet of horrors, Samuel Ceely and Joan Melhuish. The world was indeed a Blue-Beard’s room. If you but turned the key you saw an array of misery and tearful faces, and hearts with blood distilling from them. It was more than that—it was a box with a Jack in it. She had touched the spring, and a monster had flown up in her face, not to be compressed and buttoned down again.